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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

" The problem in most western democracies is, that it is nearly impossible to enforce a law that is not accepted by the people"

It's not a bug, its a feature.

Seriously, the very idea of democracy is to only have laws accepted by the people.

So if there is no acceptance, there should be no law. Unless it is accepted to have emergency authorian rule, like in this case.

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Would be nice if democracy would really work like that. In reality the ruling parties can make the laws how they like no matter if people will like it or not. Think for example on the current plan in the US to break all end-to-end encryption: people will not like it but it does not matter

That's not a counterexample. The claim was about enforcement of a law, not proposed legislation. It hasn't worked very well for other governments that have tried a similar approach, so I have little reason to believe people would just stop using E2E encryption. For a more apt example, consider digital piracy laws which are IIRC in the US explicitly ignored up to a certain number of counted (far from actual!) abuses.

"people will not like it but it does not matter"

It does matter what the people like and not. The problem in this case is just, that most people do not at all understand the implications of breaking encryption. Actually most barley know what encryption is at all. Thats why there is no outrage.

There was this analysis of bills passed and who supported them a while back by someone at Princeton. Turns out public opinion has a near negligible impact. https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem/

I feel like this is ignoring how self-centered most people are.

There's plenty of laws that your average person agrees with because they want everyone else to follow them: pay your taxes, follow the speed limit, don't be loud after 10 PM, and clean up your dogs poop. But at the same time, they have no problem making exceptions for themselves.

So whether or not any individual follows a certain rule is not indicative of their support of the rule, and a lot of people breaking a certain rule doesn't make it nondemocratic.

> Unless it is accepted to have emergency authorian rule, like in this case.

Post socialist seem to understand what a national emergency is and when it's on, you shut up and do as told. I'm a Hungarian, living in England; the brits have no grasp on this scenario. Somewhere deep down it feels like we needed this pandemic to:

a, undestand one's "rights" doesn't always apply

b, to realize we're living in the golden years* - it's cushioned, comfortable, wonderful, and that we should cherish it and value it.

* Iron Maiden - Wasted Years https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mmszv0jpvSY

>undestand one's "rights" doesn't always apply

It's funny, movies got it wrong, you don't need mass deaths, zombies or giant deadly global disasters to have people accept their rights being suspended and acquiesce to being herded like sheep under strict authoritarian rules under threat of monetary punishment or even incarnation....you just need to make them scared of being sick...

All countries have had challenges like this before, be it world war 1/2, conscription, etc.

It's not an excuse to lose rights outside the confines of the emergency.

It might be true post-Russian dominated states might still have recent memories on how to obey a central authority (mainly on pain of 'disappearing' into something like a gulag or being executed), it's not a lesson we need to learn thanks.

It's still hard for many of us to take the threat seriously, but that'll change.

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