How long can a democracy maintain emergency limits and still call itself free?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Let's see:
* Forced to download an app by the state
* Forced to jump when the state says "jump!"
* Acceding to the concept that there is a state-sanctioned place where everyone is supposed to be (prison colony?)
* Acceding to whatever punishment the police may decide to mete out for failing to confirm that one is where one is supposed to be even if one is already there
That's the thing with slippery slopes. The farther you go down, the more impossible it becomes to climb back up.
> In return for trading away their liberty, Australians gained a huge safety dividend. COVID-19 has killed 194 of every 100,000 Americans, 77 of every 100,000 Israelis, and only four of every 100,000 Australians. That low death toll is a tremendous upside. What remains to be seen is whether Australia can maintain that performance without permanently ending core attributes of life in a liberal democracy, including freedom of movement, peaceable assembly, and basic privacy.
We’re still in the middle of this. If we could have nice things, these restrictions wouldn’t need to be enforced. We’ll have to see what happens once the country is adequately vaccinated.
There are 45,000 people in Australia who are alive right now who would not be if Australia had the same death rate as the USA. So they're doing pretty well.
the idea that the difference in death rate is due to some intrinsic policy or mandated behavior rather than something more simple like population density/metropolis commonality/average temperature/humidity, etc seems like a pretty big leap -- and that seems to be your point , no?
is there already some big comprehensive list of social policies that provably worked to reduce death rate during the covid-19 pandemic across the board with environmental factors normalized out?
I thought we were still in the middle of this experiment, but i'd love to see some data if it exists.
Also, Australia is ridiculously dense. Most of our pop is in capital cities. it's big and empty.
For example, my partner goes for a daily walk along the foreshore of the beach. On the weekend she'll go for a bush hike. This is all within the strict Sydney lockdown laws because she's staying within a 5km radius of her home.
Moreover, their lockdown means that I can go about my life more or less uninterrupted, because their outbreak is limited from reaching me.
You might have missed this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28391548
And the AZ deals the gov't has made was not transparent, which reeks of corruption, and it bit them in the ass now. Even now, the gov't (note, the gov't, not the medical community) is recommending that young people talk to their GP and take AZ (conveniently, this absolves the gov't of the responsibility of providing more pfizer, and force the young people between a rock and a hard place in terms of risk).
So if there are any australians here reading this, you will do well to never vote for the liberal party in your life time.
The Aussie population, by and large, really wants to be vaccinated. There's some who are a bit illogical about the perceived risks of AZ blood clots, but that's firmly on the media who played up that risk at a time when the risk of covid proper was minimised due to our success. This has created a subset of people who insist on waiting for Pfizer.
But that wouldn't be a problem if our government hadn't fucked up ordering vaccines so badly in the first place. Their work was truly atrocious.
Am I reading that correctly?
The federal gov't almost didn't want to have lockdown in the first wave, and fortunately it was the state gov't doing it (by medical advice) that pushed it over.
The fact that you somehow confuse it together into one lump, and attribute it to a singular government entity decision, either means you did not really do any research or look into it. Or you are maliciously spreading FUD to cause distrust in existing institutions.
You trust the government decision to implement lockdown but not the decision regarding the AZ vaccine?
I would not in a million years trade Australia's restrictions for those of the United States just to exchange Australia's death rate with that of the US, and it's hard to imagine that any reasonable, well-adjusted person would want to do that.
so tell me if you know personally anyone who has died? What if that trade includes someone from your family? Does your tune suddenly change if the lack of restrictions would affect you?
All i hear is that you feel you don't want to make any sacrifices, because it only benefits somebody else.
We tolerate --- even demand --- higher speed limits because the time saved by driving faster outweighs the additional deaths caused. It may sound callous to put the trade-off in those terms, but it's true. And I bet you, personally, would absolutely hate it you weren't able to drive more than 25mph ever.
Why should COVID be different?
When you optimize for "safety" to the exclusion of all other considerations, you create a dystopia.
A non-zero number of COVID deaths is a fair price for restoring our society to normality. The weird refusal of people to apply cost-benefit analysis to COVID mitigation is gravely concerning. Without cost-benefit analysis, we can't make good decisions.
We don't drive above 25mph because there is already cost benefit analysis done, at the governmental transportation department level. The average person assumes this analysis is mostly correct, and thus agree (implicitly) to follow the rules.
How come all of a sudden, people stop believing that such analysis wasn't done for the actions undertaken for lockdown?
How come, conveniently, that people who oppose such lockdown are claiming that their preferred option - that of opening up - is somehow a better trade?
1) You leave out the long list of ways we've tried very, very hard to make driving as safe as possible while not sacrificing the entire point of the car, to get somewhere faster. There is a trade off, but the equation isn't nearly as callous as you make it seem.
2) The equation for Covid isn't "live free or die" either. There's a lot of middle ground that mostly involves taking up limited medical resources for something that could have been avoided while still conducting your normal day to day activities with some minor modifications. That trade-off is a simple one.
45,000 people in Australia are alive right now who would be dead if Australia had the USA's death rate.
I'm quite sure the family and friends of every single one of those 45,000 people strongly disagree with you.
What has amazed me is how there are many Aussie's who agree with the rules and are happy to comply. It's amazing.
Some measures become targets, sometimes. Sometimes those become less useful; other times they are both useful and not useful in different ways.
Determining when something is useful is too nuanced and multi-dimensional to reduce it to a catchy phrase.
If you are simply critical of my brevity and not my message, I agree with you but am surprised that you would be less critical of the message to which I replied.
If you believe there is no evidence of society conforming itself in drastic ways to attempt to control infection rates, we may be operating with different facts, but I unfortunately remain unaware of which facts yours are, and apparently you of mine.
Edit: It is my position that the actions of authorities should be aligned with the preferred outcomes of the governed, and any relevant information made transparently available to the governed to be fairly evaluated. My assumption is that in the case of Australia and others, a mandate to fight a virus has become an outsized metric in the role of governing and some other leading institutions, and other issues are not being addressed that should be.
Often repeated on this forum: positive assertions require the support. In this case, something like, "here is how the current situation resembles this abstraction and thus we can conclude XYZ". You seem to feel the work is done just by making a passing comment that superficially resembles the situation. Some dots that would be worth connecting:
1. What is the a priori difference between measure and target?
2. How can we tell when we have passed between the two?
3. Can a measure be a target and still be useful?
4. What if a measure is sometimes a target to some people, but sometimes purely a measure to others? Or at different times, or different locales?
5. Is there any context to expand the problem dimensionality to beyond an artificial difference of Measure/Target?
There are plenty of other explanations that could be offered, and would fit the available facts. If alternative explanations could fit the same facts, it requires additional work to disprove other explanations before deciding on "the right answer" (which doesn't really exist). Or one could, ya know, acknowledge that any particular interpretation is just an opinion and not particularly insightful.
Looking for alternatives and seriously considering them is a critical step for reducing bias. I will leave it as an exercise for you to work through your own biases - anything I suggest at this point would be dismissed. However, if you find yourself seeing this as either this-way, or that-way, you are probably experiencing tunnel vision and not seeing the complexity and messiness of real life situations.
Regardless, a glib phrase that might apply in some ways, and doesn't apply in others, is not a particularly useful or insightful approach.
NSW (a state of 8.1 Million) had just over 1000 new cases today, and 12 deaths - and that is the worst day of the whole pandemic.
That's... not like other countries.
France is 60% fully vaccinated, Australia less than 30%. There's the real problem. At that disastrously low vaccination rate it's only lockdown keeping the death rate that low.
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
We are also vaccinating like mad right now. The vaccination numbers for the UK were about 160K, and for NSW about 140K, but that's for a pop of 67mil vs 8.1mil.
Our first doses for some age groups are also hitting 90%, so I'm taking that to mean there's less vaccine hesitancy here too.
NSW did have it's worst day, but I reckon overall we'll be fine.
Micheal Tam's modelling is probably the best widely available a frequently updated[1]. The new daily infections is still increasing, but the rate of increase of new daily infections is finally beginning to decrease. This is probably an effect of the lockdown, and shows how unlikely it is to be free of this before the end of the year.
The increased vaccination rate is fantastic. Once we are above 60% or 70% we should be more worried about hospitalisation rates and deaths than infections.
Wouldn't this be how we would expect things to work? Places with more infections need more resources. It seems to me like the "strong reason to believe bias" is the exact same evidence as "this is how I would expect it to work in absence of bias".
In those countries people die all the time due to reasons which could have been prevented with regular health check ups and care, COVID restrictions were only making it worse for people who have to work everyday to pay for that days food.
5 states have fewer than 10% of their ICU beds remaining. The public death rate of victims who receive treatment when necessary has virtually no relation with the reality of "number of people requiring medical care > medical care available". If those 5 states weren't doing even the minimum of vaccines/distancing/masking that they're doing today, they would be at 0% capacity, without question.
Definitely what Australia is doing is too much, but opening everything and leaving it to individual choices is an incomprehensibly bad position.
Is there evidence of that? From my limited and non-expert perspective, it seems that states that had substantial restrictions (California) experienced the same types of waves that states with barely any restrictions (Florida) experienced at different times. It seems like we have a lot less control of these waves than we think we do.
There were tough curfews in India and police literally beating up people on the streets.
https://scroll.in/video/957293/watch-indian-police-are-beati...
Then delta came. Turns out being infected with one variant doesn’t offer as much protection against another variant as being vaccinated. (https://directorsblog.nih.gov/2021/06/22/how-immunity-genera...)
> The new evidence shows that protective antibodies generated in response to an mRNA vaccine will target a broader range of SARS-CoV-2 variants carrying “single letter” changes in a key portion of their spike protein compared to antibodies acquired from an infection.
So yeah, life is back to normal in India. Until the next variant.
So no. Next variant might affect India but no more than the other countries still enforcing crazy lockdowns.
Source: all over the news
Screw everyone else though right?
Have a moment to ponder the existence of immigrant small business owners facing bankruptcy in Parramatta, the furloughed truckies in Blacktown, the working class kids in overcrowded government housing in Penrith.
> Stop mistaking our country for your own.
I'm Australian
It's also convenient that these suburbs are not the ones being targeted by huge police operations
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jul/08/weste...
Essentially let's say you are responsible for helping run ministry of finance, and then you are rotated out to manage some rural agriculture thing, and so on.
If you think it tends toward the former—to do a job that we don't have all individually have time for, and so to represent our interests by doing that job, not just by voting how polls say the average constituent with little relevant education or experience on a given topic would vote—then the "representative" part of "representative democracy" is indispensable. If you think it's wholly the latter, then direct democracy is a suitable, and superior, replacement.
[EDIT] and obviously there's room for a spectrum of opinions on the topic, not just binary extremes—though I actually don't think the representative-democracy position is the extreme version of that side, like the pure-direct-democracy is for the other—but I use those for illustrative purposes.
So for the general case where we have representatives doing the voting, we should have a mechanism where we can switch representatives in cases where we don't agree on specific issues. And that's where principles from liquid democracy could bring solutions to the current coarse system that we have.
But I don't think there is a silver bullet.
Like Brexit?
Big issues tend to be complicated issues on many levels. I don't see how you can agree that full-time politicians are required because people don't have the time or expertise to be involved in every aspect of the political process, but also that for big, important issues - almost certainly requiring the most time and expertise to fully understand the arguments and ramifications of all options - suddenly the same non-expert people are suddenly better than full-time politicians.
What happens is Brexit. A ridiculously complicated process (the UK leaving the EU) that could be done in all kinds of different ways (in the single-market or instead in the EEA, in/out the customs zone, free movement or not, a Norway-style semi-in arrangement, tariffs, regulations, membership of other EU institutions and so on) each with their own trade-offs and complications, on top of the ridiculous difficulty of simply trying to predict the known unknowns arising from unpicking a 50-year political and economic union.
https://www.politico.eu/article/uks-brexit-options-explained...
Instead we got:
"Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”
[ ] Remain a member of the European Union
[ ] Leave the European Union
where option two could mean anything, and in practise it let the Euro-hardliners and UKIP types define it as the hardest of hard Brexits and fuck the consequences. When it took years for Parliament to agree on the final result for what Brexit was (and the UK's system of government makes passing legislation easy ie. the govmt. has a majority in one house and can override the other house) it just shows how the idea that direct democracy fails at a certain scale. All nuance, complexity and context are stripped away and replaced by a single sentence asking a yes or no question that only shows people's feels over reals.
The fact that parliament became gridlocked for years afterwards as it failed to agree a sane way forward is not a great argument for avoiding referenda and relying on the wisdom of elected representatives.
The U.S. election system, campaign finance laws, and lobbying effectively result in a corruption machine for representatives.
- Low levels of corruption [1]
- Easy voting with elections run by an independent body [2]
- Very strict election financing rules coupled with public funding of elections [3]
- A proportional election system [4]
- Relatively low inequality (though admittedly this is worsening) [5]
The result is high trust in our government and public institutions.
One thing noticeably absent is much direct democracy. We do occasionally have referendums -- for example, we recently voted on euthanasia (accepted) and legalization of drugs (rejected) -- but those actually have mixed reception as people can think of them as "cop-outs" by politicians.
[1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020/table/nzl [2] https://elections.nz/about/about-the-electoral-commission/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_funding_in_New_Zeala... [4] https://elections.nz/democracy-in-nz/what-is-new-zealands-sy... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_in...
- Publicly funded journalism [1] and no Murdoch press.
I don't think you understand.
In Australia, the strong lockdowns are widely supported. There was an election in Queensland during 2020 where the Queensland government bore a lot of criticism from NSW and other governments for their restrictions.
They were returned with an increased majority.
I'm in South Australia and I support the policy outlined in this piece.
It's a freedom tradeoff - we are lockdown free, can go about our business without getting COVID.
Until the vaccination rate is high enough, I support measures our goverment is taking to keep it like that.
It's true people are getting tired of this. But in general people (correctly) blame the slow vaccine roll out rather than the lockdown policy for their unhappiness.
I do think the NSW govt is hoping that with a high vaccination rate, they can treat delta the same as original covid, and completely eradicate it without doing lockdowns. Will see how that goes.
Seems unnecessary to use an app when the network can triangulate pretty well in densely populated areas.
The second amendment is holding this back from happening in the US.
No guns the population has no chance and the government can do anything they want.
Funny thing is, all the people who are most fervent about it are the people who think trump won the election and yet they lay down and took the loss, the exact thing that the amendment is supposed to prevent, like impotent little children.
What a very effective amendment! /s
This only applies to specific people in home quarantine and only for a short period of time - 14 days. i.e people that have returned to the country from overseas that would normally be in quarantine in a government facility for that same period.
People now have the option of quarantining at home, and if they choose to do so, have to show that they are quarantining at home rather than saying they will, and then heading off into town and infecting others. (As many people have done).
You are trying to portray this as something being forced on all citizens, indefinitely when that couldn't be further from reality.
...
> people that have returned to the country
I do not know who's being deliberately misleading here.
Please note[1]:
> It will start this week for people returning from New South Wales and Victoria.
> People wanting to return to South Australia and home quarantine will have to apply to SA Health.
So this is clearly applicable to Australian citizens within Australia. Citizens of Australia are not allowed to move freely within Australia. Before an Australian citizen can travel from one part of Australia to another part of Australia, they have to ask the government to allow them to do so. They must accede to the points I listed.
After that the government will expand the program to international travelers.
Once a populace accepts that they are not allowed travel and that the government can arbitrarily place people under house arrest and subject to torture (and knowledge of random intrusions into your life can happen at any time - even during a long, relaxing shower or something is psychological torture), there isn't much that will stop people with the power from expanding their control.
[1]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-08-23/how-will-south-austra...
Specifically, I am wondering whether similar methods were used to deal with the following[1]:
> #How common are notifiable infectious diseases?
> More than 593,000 cases of notifiable diseases were reported to the NNDSS in 2019. Four infectious diseases accounted for 82% of these notifications to Australian health authorities in 2019:
> * influenza—more than 313,000 notifications
> * chlamydia—almost 103,000 notifications
> * campylobacter (a gastrointestinal infection)—almost 36,000 notifications
> * gonorrhoea—more than 34,000 notifications.
[1]: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-health/infectious...
Public health gets involved in notifying the partners of STD index cases, with varying degrees of coercion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarantine
[1] https://theconversation.com/why-are-australians-so-accepting...
> I see, so you are claiming that governments in Australia have always dealt with infectious diseases using oppression?
Ignoring for the moment the prerogative term "oppression", using the rule of law to stop the spread of hazards is pretty common.
In South Australia we've had to throw put fresh fruit when bringing it from interstate because of the risk of fruit fly infection, and there are currently strong restrictions stopping movement of fruit between postcodes because of an outbreak, eg: https://fruitfly.sa.gov.au/outbreak-restrictions/red-area
This is a restriction on movement of potential infection vectors. SA remains free of Covid, and until we can get our vaccination rate up I'd prefer to have this restriction than a lockdown.
BTW, there's historical precedence, check what happened during the Spanish flu pandemic.
Sanitation expectations and standards fluctuate wildly amongst different cultures and populations; that doesn't mean your ethnocentric view on sanitation makes your civilization better than other ones.
But we don't. Because we don't restrict freedoms for responsible 99% just to take care of the remaining 1%.
Instead they are being allow to quarantine from the comfort of their home, and if they choose to do so they have to use an app to prove they are staying at home, but again this is only for the short duration of their quarantine period.
You are scare mongering and trying to make this something that it isn't - it isn't being forced on large numbers of people, let alone the entire state. It's not intended to be used by people not in quarantine, and for those are in quarantine, they only need it _whislst they are still in quarantine_
However, if your outrage is actually about a states right to enforce a quarantine on potentially infected incoming travellers during a pandemic fullstop .... well my friend, that's a ship that has long since sailed - literally hundreds of years ago.
And yes requiring 14 day mandatory quarantine for interstate travel is insane. The virus is endemic. You all in Australia are struggling in futility against one of the strongest forces of nature, its virome. Most of the rest of the Western world is looking on in horror. Even writers at The Atlantic. Best of luck, though. Sincerely.
I can almost guarantee the infrastructure this is running on is USA owned AWS.
> You all in Australia are struggling in futility against one of the strongest forces of nature.
Well actually, most of the states in oz have delta either under control/trending down towards elimination again, or in the case of tazzy, totally eliminated. It's only NSW that's struggling (which co-incidentally is the state giving people the option of quarantining at home with the use of this app).
Personally, I'm from over the ditch in NZ. Our delta cases peaked at 84 a week or so back, down towards 28 today after two weeks of a pretty relaxed lockdown. Most of NZ is now out of the hard lockdown, and probably should be back to normal in another couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to yet another covid free summer, with no worries about masks, crowded sports stadiums and camp grounds or me/anyone I know personally getting the virus.
Yup, we're bound to catch it eventually I'm sure, but I'm looking forward to getting it much later when we have better treatments that don't involve horse worming medication. Treatment/mitigation is much better now than it was 18 months ago, and I'm sure in a year or so, it will be better still.
Right! And make sure you do everything possible to keep us out until it's safe. Don't let your politicians do stupid deals with ours that would make things worse for you/NZ (love the place). Yours I'm not sure about but ours are as slimy as they come.
Not just NSW, Victoria has officially given up as well.
Victorian Premier Dan Andrews said just yesterday covid zero is no longer possible.
Tasmania will receive a repatriation flight from the UK next week, 100 people have n to hotel quarantine in Hobart. I won’t be surprised if it leaks in to the community.
The vaccines we have are not sterilising. They don’t prevent infection nor transmission, looks like they only reduce the severity and transmission.
Australia has definitely lost this fight, the virus will spread to all states, it’s just a matter of time.
Quarantine is leaky, people will mit perfectly abide by restrictions.
Actually it is South Australia, which is COVID free.
Unlike many Americans, most Australians would prefer to yield to principle than to suicide over it. The pathological notion that your country has for so-called freedoms (which never really existed anyway) is something the world watches with aghast amazement—right, you don't see it as you're in the thick of it but the rest of the world does (the fact that we also speak a form of English is now a source of an embarrassment to us). (And it's now even worse since the Afghanistan fiasco—sorry I mean the Vietnam repeat exercise.)
Let's get a few facts straight: clearly you—along with many of your fellow countrymen—haven't a clue about what happened during earlier pandemics in the US. Right, you're clueless about your own US history in respect of previous pandemics or you'd be much more circumspect in your criticism of others. I would strongly suggest that you examine the rules, laws and regulations that were in place in the US during the 1918-20 Spanish Flu pandemic and you'll find that some of them would put anything we've done over here to shame! Go on—do a search, then read and learn!
Let me continue: I'd also suggest that you Americans had absolutely no qualms about quarantining Mary Mallon (Typhoid Mary) for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon. Her life must have been hell because of her forced incarceration. Your antiquated health system had no proper way of managing her so you just locked her up then let her rot until she died!
And more, let me quote "Quarantined for Life: The Tragic History of US Leprosy Colonies - Stripped of their most basic human rights, patients nonetheless built lives and communities": https://www.history.com/news/leprosy-colonies-us-quarantine. I've nothing to add as the story speaks for itself.
There's much more but I've proved my point.
Now to the local facts here. The fact that we were not strict enough in policing the disease is the reason that it got away from us. That we let international people in and some damn taxi driver idiot drove an infected aircrew to a hotel without protection started it all. If we'd implemented the strict quarantine measures that we had had in place in 1918-19 for the Spanish Flu then it would not have escaped anywhere near as easily.
"Most of the rest of the Western world is looking on in horror. Even writers at The Atlantic."
Oh yeah, if most of the rest of the world is looking at us then it's turned away from looking at you out of horror, we're comic relief by comparison.
Next factoid: the per capita death rate in the US leapfrogs over ours here in Australia by at least an order of magnitude. Why? Because millions of bloody-mined Americans won't wear masks or get vaccinated out of principle (lunacy). Right, they'd prefer to suffer COVID and likely die rather than to admit they're wrong—very grossly wrong (frankly it's sickening to watch it playing out like a tragic soap opera on our TVs every day—all this from the so-called leader of the free world). Even your president says 'it's now a pandemic of the unvaccinated.'
No wonder the Chinese are gloating and laughing themselves sick. If the whole horrible shemozzle weren't so utterly tragic then one would reckon we were watching an episode of the Keystone Cops.
Next time, do your research, get your facts right (I know that's a damned hard ask given that in the US the word 'fact' has come to mean anything or utterance that its utterer thinks it ought to be).
P.S. Keep the downvotes coming, they're further verifying my points!
Like a holy ascetic hermit mocking the commoners.
Things are not going back to normal, no matter how much we act like they are.
(I'm sorry I never studied psychology. I've always wanted to know why some people can state categorically that black is white or vise versa when the overwhelming evidence is to the contrary.) :-)
Quarantine is voluntary. If you choose to leave it, you face the consequences.
This is a personal responsibility problem not a society wide problem.
Simple as.
That's actually not correct. I don't expect you to believe it but you'd be able to ascertain that's it's incorrect if you read some of my earlier posts on the subject.
Several points, as I've said previously, I rather like lockdowns as they allow me time to do things that I've not time for otherwise - or time that I wouldn't normally be able to justify. Check for yourself (it's there in writing).
My main point is that I've precious little time for bloody-minded fools who: (a) deny science - that's to say the best advice available, (b) clearly haven't studied the facts - not even superficially so, (c) are acting in ways contrary to their own health and best interests and (d) their lack of concern for the health of others who do actually care. People who are knowingly prepared to infect others who may die as a consequence are a dangerous menace to society and throughout history we've locked them up - as I've mentioned Mary Mallon is a case in point (the tragedy of that case was how she was treated after she was locked up).
Throughout history - even going back to the Black Death/plague and before, people were expected to follow protocols - locked up in their houses etc. This is not a new requirement. So what gives the right of stupid people to do so now? None I'd suggest.
BTW, in response to the ludicrous, inaccurate and often dangerous memes circulating on Social Media and elsewhere, a colleague of mine coined the phrase "We've reached peak stupid". Not only do I concur but I'm sorry I didn't think of that myself. It says it all really.
But please, continue looking on in horror at us from (I'm assuming) America. Your post is a wonderful mix of condescending tone and factual inaccuracy, with the added cherry-on-top that you have absolutely moronic states like Florida "fighting for their freedoms" by banning mask mandates. This would be infuriating if it wasn't so painfully stupid.
Australia, despite being a wealthy country with strong ties to vaccine manufacturing nations, did not prioritize these vaccines and instead has relied on rolling lockdowns and other invasive measures.
Yes, our federal government absolutely failed when it comes to vaccine supply. It is our state governments that have instituted lockdowns, because of this failure on behalf of the federal government, to squash cases and stop our hospital system from reaching breaking point.
Yes, our federal government screwed up, and I don't know anyone who doesn't agree with that point, but given that, and given the outcomes America experienced before vaccination was prevalent, it is the height of hubris and arrogance to suggest that you and the rest of the Western world (this "data" being pulled from where, exactly?) is "horrified at us".
I think most people in Australia would strongly agree our vaccine policy was a complete and utter disaster. Probably the most expensive mistake in Australia's history.
Perhaps I misunderstood your point, but it appears that you are arguing that Australia preferred the option of rolling lockdowns?
When you have no vaccines available there are two options. Overload your hospital system or lockdown. Everyone would have preferred having vaccines when the US and the UK received theirs.
Furthermore, the state governments that are actually in charge of lockdowns, are not responsible for procuring the vaccines. The federal government were under minor scrutiny for making a mess of that. This reflects the media landscape in Australia that is dominated by NewsCorp.
That is false dilemma. In free society law-abiding citizens are trusted to observe the law even without persistent surveillance.
We also do not carry persistent surveillance tool to control whether we do not steal or assault, so why not handle quarantine the same way?
Anecdotally, I received an automated speeding ticket in the mail today. I went 36 in a 30. I really try to be a good driver, and generally watch my speed, but apparently I didn’t that day. But was I confronted by the officer who clocked me? No, I was the only car in sight. I received high resolution photos of my car and video is available online for my review. If that’s not persistent surveillance, I don’t know what else to call it.
What you describe is what should be, but we are witnessing disturbing trends unfold.
That's an easy answer. Consequences.
When one single person not following the rules can force the entire state into a lockdown (as was the cause in NSW) the trade off makes a lot of sense.
That's the problem. People are not obeying the law.
for something like a pandemic, the public cannot be trusted to make a personal sacrifice for the public good.
As long as such surveillance is limited to such medical emergencies, and rescinded afterwards, it is acceptable. Of course, this requires that the citizens be vigilant, but the current protesting, and fear-mongering and misinformation is beyond just being vigilant, but is instead defying health orders and delaying the end of the pandemic. If that's not stupid, i dont know what is.
The government is made up from persons in the "public." If the public cannot be trusted to act in the public good, the government cannot be trusted to do so either either.
It sounds like your argument is towards some sort of authoritarianism / monarchy which removes power from the public so that someone can force them to act for the public good. I do admit you have a point that authoritarianism/monarchy has its advantages, and one is the ability to put a tighter control on populace undergoing a pandemic (short-sighted thinking is a fundamental weakness of democracies electing leaders for only a few years at a time).
that's a false equivalency.
An action on the part of the gov't does not equate to the "average" action of the general population. The very fact that there must be gov't mandated laws against stealing is evidence of this - otherwise, people would steal and loot!
Plenty of people opposed to the draft in war, and yet it must be done in the public good. The only saving grace, because of western democracy, is that any gov't who continue to flounder the power granted to them, would (ostensibly) get voted out. This doesn't happen in an authoritarian gov't - like china for example.
But people who claim mistrust of the public institutions are destroying that mechanism - leading to the very last US election, where some people are de-legitimizing the outcome because they believe that some "authoritarian" entity is forcing it upon them.
I dont know whether these people are stupid, or brainwashed by something.
It doesn't, but in a truly democratic country it would.
>that's a false equivalency.
In a democracy the government is all drawn from public. The government of democracies is all members of public (save some essentially powerless queen/royalty as in UK). So no, it's not.
>The very fact that there must be gov't mandated laws against stealing is evidence of this - otherwise, people would steal and loot!
People do steal and loot under virtually every democratic government. Laws are mostly to tell you what happens if you do it, not to set up surveillance to invade you privacy to check that you don't (although I must admit this has been more common lately).
>Plenty of people opposed to the draft in war, and yet it must be done in the public good
Your words not mine. I vehemently disagree "it must be done." Our last draft was disregarded in a widespread fashion, and ultimately the dodgers were essentially pardoned because the government had to yield to the "average" action of the general populace.
>But people who claim mistrust of the public institutions are destroying that mechanism
The loss of trust in public institution are in large part a result in the fact they have destroyed the mechanism of their legitimacy, the constitution. We now live in a society where 4th amendment is void (drug dog can "alert" on your car/person and you can be searched at any time, and even patted down without even that). A policeman can shoot a woman in the middle of the night on a bogus warrant, and the only guy looking at prosecution will be the guy who missed (see: Breonna Taylor). I can be tossed in jail for 5-10 years if I decide to remove a brace from a pistol and put a stock on it instead (2nd amendment is dead). Same 5+ years if you own a pot leaf and a gun at the same time and did nothing else "wrong" (see: conviction of RussianFPS, although he did not get this much jail time).
Posse Comitatus Act is essentially dead as now our police force is essentially another military branch armed by relinquished items from the military and sees itself as a military like force for controlling the populace, complete with armored vehicles, machine guns, explosives, urban warfare type training, and virtual invulnerability from prosecution for killing the populace and special privileges the common citizen doesn't have like qualified immunity and the ability to own different weapons than civilians even when off duty.
Either the public institutions as they stand are powerless to stop the erosion of liberty and rights, or they are the ones perpetuating the erosion. Either way they are illegitimate.
People like stories that they can grasp in general, and populism as a political tactic provides an extremely simple narrative of a clear-cut "elite" group onto which almost any grievance can be projected as being caused by - and that makes it easy for people to paint themselves as heroic figures fighting evil and thus allow them to justify whatever means they use to get there.
And the effects of deprivation on people's health, cognition, mental health and relationships make it harder for people who are struggling to avoid embracing simple narratives that fit their biases. People who have everything and have never struggled a day in their life do the same after all, people are people at the end of the day.
Populism is the enemy of liberal democracy - and institutions in general - but the problem is that as a tactic it's easy and effective as a way of whipping people up as long as you don't care about and aren't affected by what happens after the angry mob is unleashed. Or if you're the rare true believer instead of being another cynical rabble-rouser.
Most people would probably say populism (political stances that emphasize the idea of "the people" and often juxtapose this group against "the elite" [wiki quote]) is pretty rational given the human condition of the modern US and the influences of our elite.
And yet a large percentage of the US still refuses to wear masks or vaccinate, effectively prolonging the pandemic they so loathe to begin with, and go against simple mask mandates for the sole reason they're laws in the first place.
So so much for that theory. We've proven it's not a rule, but a baseless fantasy.
We also had high mask use, fairly low deaths, and fewer restrictions than most of Europe.
Because the pandemy has a huge societal cost that can be alleviated quickly if you get people to follow the law.
If you get people to stop stealing or assaulting for a month using measures, it won't cause less stealing or assaulting afterward.
What if you do not possess a smartphone? What choice do you have, then? Are you just forced into hotel quarantine or do they lend you a smartphone? (Genuine question.)
If you prefer, you are also able to use the app and stay home.
As a person that had to stay in quarantine for going back home for the last weeks of my mothers life due terminal cancer, I had to stay 10 days locked in my home, even having countless tests, not even knowing if she would be alive and being told that they can make an exception for the funeral - so kind of them. We were treated like some sub-human criminals by the police, being called and checked (some friends who had their daughters coming from university back home had to come to the window every morning, all 4 members of the family to get "counted" by a police officer). What's funny is that 1 year before the pandemic my house was broken into, never heard back from the police, but it's good to see that they are doing their job in checking up on us, the virus criminals.
What is the span of temporary here ?
I'm a little surprised we didn't see similar moves in the US, but COVID spread so quickly there that it would have been kind of meaningless. The maritime provinces of Canada, though, had a very similar arrangement at one point, effectively cutting them off from the rest of the country.
All that said, I do think Australia is on a very slippery slope here and the current government is no fan of civil liberties. The restrictions on leaving Australia are particularly indefensible.
if those leaving would sign a waiver that they may be refused entry back (e.g., people who left australia after the first wave, but decided to come back when delta variant first appeared), then it would be ok to let them leave.
Aussies have the whole empty continent nearby to banish the wrong-thinkers to exile /s
There is no room for debate or testing how deep your beliefs are, because you’ve been clear on your position - so from a communication perspective you’re good.
From a perspective of self-determinism, I think you’re my antithesis.
PS: Watch this short clip for an idea of what news looks like in Australia at the moment: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1429786126815010820
This has been the fishiest thing for me during the entire pandemic. It seems the slightest questioning of the mainstream narrative results in censorship. Even pointing this out can result in censorship or people lashing out.
These four points seem to be in contradiction with each other:
1. Most of Australia's media supports the lockdowns
2. Most of Australia's media is owned by Rupert Murdoch
3. Rupert Murdoch's media is right-wing
4. The right wing opposes the lockdowns
Yet I hear combinations of those points all the time. What's happening here?
https://twitter.com/joshfrydenberg/status/131622619140619059...
Once the conservative government in NSW implemented lock downs they were (mostly) suddenly on board.
This of course is more of an indictment than them just being opposed to lockdowns. They aren't opposed for ideological reasons, just for political convenience.
2. Australians overall are less frightened of their government. Any Indigenous Australians on hn can attest that does not mean everybody is safe from state violence. Police still kill people, power is still abused, but comparing my life in the US and in Australia, most people experience the government as being more benign, and helpful than people in general experience in the US. It's not black and white, its just a few nudges along on a spectrum of grey. So most people are viewing the these laws as clumsy collective effort that they do not imagine will be abused.
There are many things that can be said about the problems with this view, but the acceptance of these laws does come from a reactionary hard line position, but rather that people find it hard to imagine that they will be abused
We're talking about Australia, after all.
The US has had standing "temporary" policies of imprisonment or assassination without trial, torture, and mass invasion of privacy for almost 20 years now. There are limitations on the rights to equal protection, to assistance of counsel in criminal prosecutions, and to open access to court hearings, which are simply accepted as status quo.
Personally I would not argue that the US is not "free"... but if you want to talk about emergency limits of democracy encroaching upon that definition, IMO the War on Terror is a stronger argument.
So what do we expect from War on Virus? Bake test kits and concentration camp?
It is understood that governments encroaching on civil liberties is, generally speaking, a bad thing. This doesn't mean it should never happen.
It is understood that that limits on freedom of movement are, generally speaking, a bad thing. This doesn't mean they should never be put in place.
People seem to have "learned" these lessons from History... but "learned" is too generous a word: lessons from History (government controls are bad when they're not in everyone's best interest) are being transposed to contexts that don't apply (you may have heard that there's an infectious disease going around).
Yeah. The last year and a half has been a foray into the "gray areas" of our freedom that anti-maskers like to pretend doesn't exist. But if you take the argument about free travel to its logical end, we should have open borders between all nations and unrestricted migration. Of course, most of them are not on board with that idea, because one way or another we've agreed that restricting free travel serves the public interest. Covid is another instance where some countries have reached the same consensus.
we should definitely have that. This will single-handedly allow equality of opportunity to be realized.
The problem is that most first world countries' people would be worse off under this scheme (with people from under-developed countries being better off).
In the long-term and not entirely. I wonder what the effect in the short- to medium-term would be on poorer countries who presumably would see a lot more emigration of demographics who have the wealth and/or skills to move somewhere with more opportunity, the "brain drain" effect of the money spent on educating someone and the loss of future tax earnings from their employment is a problem that exists now after all.
And again in the short- to medium-term how would unrestricted immigration play out? Immigrants are a net economic benefit to their new countries but does that hold for all amounts of immigration within a given time? It seems to me 500,000 immigrants in a single year is not equivalent to 50,000 immigrants each year over a decade even if in the long run the result is the same.
> The problem is that most first world countries' people would be worse off under this scheme (with people from under-developed countries being better off).
That's a very zero-sum way of looking at it. Globalisation and free trade have overall made the poorest countries a lot better off while also making the richer ones better off, shouldn't open borders do the same in the long-run? I'm not sure it would be good for countries though, which itself would have knock-on effects...
TL;DR open borders and free migration are great, but I can see a shit-load of short-term pain were it to happen!
a lot of anti-masking is due to the influence or propaganda via the right-wing media (such as fox news, or other murdoch media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_News_C...).
I want to believe that this may be a form of infiltration and covert activity from foreign powers attempting to influence the west - after all democracy's weakest link are the people. But i can't be sure it is foreign, and not self-inflicted.
The Spanish Flu was unquestionably more dangerous than COVID is. What changed in society that so many people are now willing to give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety?
On a deeper level, I think many people in our modern civilization are in the grip of a paralyzing denial and fear of death, which makes it easier to corral them in one direction or another by just gesturing at the possibility of it.
I assume you're referring the United States - it's worth noting that the well-armed states like Texas and Florida have rejected draconian restrictions while mostly disarmed states like California and New York might as well be Australia.
Though the correlation is heavily confounded, obviously. Red states by definition have a bunch of conservatives, who both despise lockdowns and are more likely to have guns. So it’s unclear how much firearms matter, strictly.
“Well-armed-and-free”? Things aren’t “normal” here. Our hospitals are barely able to function because this state is full of chucklefucks who think everything is a conspiracy.
This isn’t freedom. This is stupidity.
But hey, at least you have your guns.
A government just looking the other way and letting people die for purely ideological reasons is not something to be proud of. Altering our behavior on an individual level is exactly what needs to happen during a pandemic.
Also I don't believe statistics exist for which states have more guns than others. And I also don't think your comment has any kind of real basis in research as to correlation between COVID lock downs and gun ownership, other than conservative voters being anti-everything in regards to coronavirus.
Florida is the 40th state by gun ownership per capita, California is 43rd, Texas is 26th. Saying “well-armed states like Texas and Florida […] mostly disarmed states like California” is an example of employing partisan-leaning based stereotypes (EDIT: And, really, probably ones driven by which states of which leanings have governors prominently in the news right now for partisan reasons), and not any real criteria of “well-armed” vs. “mostly-disarmed” states.
If it were you could argue that most places always had curfews since most businesses aren't allowed to be open during the night regardless of covid.
California has the second most number of privately held guns in absolute terms.
Perhaps your mental model about gun ownership & pandemic response could use a recalibration?
Truly: when have private arms been indispensable in advancing the cause of liberty in the US? We have lots of examples of expanding freedoms and liberties, and even a few of successfully resisting the curtailing of same (though we actually seem pretty bad at that despite all our guns, and tend to fix those things later, if we do at all, rather than avoid them in the first place), but when have guns been what did the trick? The closest thing I can think of is the Civil War, in which some organized regiments fought with personal muskets and rifles until they were issued something (much) better, but, like, a lot of those private arms landed on the "preserve slavery" side of that conflict, which seems to be a recurring problem with the private-arms-preserve-liberty thing, which is that they seem to be at least as useful for doing the opposite. They played a role in escalating criminal violence (e.g. Bleeding Kansas) without which, maybe, the course of the war would have been significantly different, but that's getting pretty far out into "butterfly flapping its wings in Japan" in terms of tracing causality or necessity, and again, the "keep people literally in chains" side got at least as much mileage out of private arms as the "but maybe don't, though" side, in that part of the conflict.
[EDIT] Downvoters: I'm very interested in counter-examples, so please do post them, if you've got 'em.
Having the ability to defend oneself makes it less likely that one will have to defend oneself.
The best I can figure as a credible argument for private arms ownership, is that it's a canary-in-a-coal-mine: states that retain private arms ownership probably aren't heading toward tyranny, but ones that lose them might—might—be. Seems pretty weak, still.
Simply, when a pro-liberty or pro-democracy position is popular enough, guns don't seem to be needed—not even the threat of them, mass resistance absent guns seems to suffice. When those positions are not popular, guns don't have have a history of helping—in fact, they tend to be used to suppress those positions, if they play a role at all.
Or do they? Again, I'd love some examples. I'm a big fan of argument-from-what's-actually-happened, when it comes to politics (and economics, for that matter) and my inability to find much of that sort of evidence in favor of widespread private firearms ownership, specifically when it's justified as being necessary to preserve liberty (there may remain other reasons to keep them around, but that's the usual argument for why we must not touch the 2nd Amendment, in the US), is why I'm at where I'm at on that issue.
Damn near everything we quibble about in politics is about marginal outcomes.
However, what I can tell, they're surely not that important, and any effect they do have is weak enough that even small effects that make them a liability to liberal democracy—which effects I believe are in evidence, given the clear role they've played as a tool for enforcing popular but illiberal positions—could easily nullify the benefits.
It is weak. For instance, Nazi were cool with private guns and made it easier to own them. They liked themselves the guns and violence. And they were heading toward tyranny full speed.
Most scholarly work shows that Nazi government used gun registration to disarm the populations they wanted to oppress.
By the time Nazi occupied France, the Germany was dictatorship for a long time. There was no moving anywhere on that topic. And it is absurd to use occupied territory as argument on this point.
I guess John Brown triggering massive paranoia and escalation toward civil war should count.
I don't believe the US version of "Modern Society", for lack of a better term, is in denial of death.
There is an overblown expectation of informed consent. If I cross the street, I have been informed I might be hit by a vehicle. Look both ways, minimize the danger. It's still there though.
If I have a child, they have to be educated, which generally means they have to go to a public school, where I have been informed they will get a minimal education. I was NOT informed that someone might come in and shoot my kid. Now we have drills and I have been informed, so it's all ok again.
COVID was sensationalized and (in the US) people felt like they had no information, so there was no informed consent as to when and where to go out safely. This is the reason COVID has been blown out of proportion. The information was initially unavailable, then it has been changing. This fails the basic tenet of Modern Civilization. We are informed about dangers to make our own behavioral linear optimizations.
Next up, vaccines and informed consent. Then people are still getting sick. There are news outlets playing it up as if the information was possibly bad and might change again. What constitutes informed consent is not uniform and people argue about it and politicize it.
The problem is that the news about the virus was as direct as the WHO (it's endemic, everyone will get it eventually) a bunch of messaging gets amplified or contradicted and the political ramifications are too high now. Note, even though the messaging shifted similarly in the relatively small area of Israel, there was uniform behavior.
They also don't pull punches when it comes to informing the population about dangers, which the US tends to do. This is because the media runs wild with anything they are given (how could it be worse?! is it overblown!? et al)
So, I agree. Disarmed. Guns (which I assume you were talking about) would not have changed anything in a mentally-permissive environment in which these laws were not protested. You need a spine first, and a tool second, and a gun last.
(serious question)
> examples of private firearms preserving liberty and democratic government.
The reason all this matters is that the question I'm concerned with is whether the standard argument for why private gun ownership is vital to a liberal democracy—that is, that they're indispensable tools for preserving both the "liberal" and the "democracy" parts of that term—is actually true. My suspicion, from what I have turned up so far, is that they're more often used (when effective, that is—they're used ineffectively too, sometimes) as a tool for imposing popular but illiberal positions, than for preserving liberty & democracy, but it's possible I've just not looked at the right evidence yet.
You might say that the Stuarts were an unpopular but (in the modern sense ) more liberal...absolutist monarchy than the populist, puritan Protectorate was an illiberal theocracy, but I'd be wary of going too far retconning modern sensibilities to 17th century England.
And, it isn't necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism
Again, I'm actually open to other forms of argument for gun ownership, and despite how my posts here have probably looked I consider measures to limit private firearms ownership unimportant, at best—I just don't find the particular position that they're extremely important to the preservation of liberal democracy such that one might reason "of course Australia is turning authoritarian—if more people there could legally own guns, that wouldn't be happening", compelling.
(1) As I understand it, open carry is illegal in California and Washington as a direct response to armed BPP demonstrations on capitol buildings.
(2) Private enforcement like was carried out by the BPP was echoed in CHAZ/CHOP, and to put it mildly, I've never seen that celebrated by gun rights activists.
(3) The BPP and police forces of the time were fairly well matched in their armament. Since then, the police are now paramilitary forces replete with military arms and armor. Are American gun rights activists deluding themselves, that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit? Or are they merely comfortable in the knowledge that the police and military are politically aligned with them?
> (3) Are American gun rights activists deluding themselves, that they'd stand a chance if the police and military decided they were gonna run shit? Or are they merely comfortable in the knowledge that the police and military are politically aligned with them?
It's largely the latter, I think, which brings me to:
Ultimately, I think the fatal flaw in the argument that private gun ownership is necessary to protect democracy, is in the fact that authoritarian turns by democracies tend to be fairly popular, when they happen, and that the pro-authoritarian citizens, whose position is likely, if not the majority, at least quite popular, will have guns, too... plus the police, and the army (if they don't have those, what's the problem? No private arms needed, authoritarian take-over is done before it can start if the police and the military aren't on its side, or at least damn close to being on its side). It's not just a lack of history of private firearms being an important pro-liberty and pro-democracy force in democratic states (so far as I can see! Again, I'd love examples)—it's that I have trouble imagining scenarios in which they likely would be, while remaining within the realm of the plausible.
It's got to be some movement that's unpopular among the military and police, so they don't support it, but popular among enough of the rest of the populace that significant numbers would take up arms, and that almost none of them would be taking up arms in against liberty and democracy, rather than for them... and is that a remotely likely situation? I don't think it is. I think for practically the whole likely problem-space, if you will, private arms are one of 1) superfluous, 2) laughably insufficient, or 3) actively harmful to the very things they're allegedly there to preserve & protect.
I don't think very many Western people will throw away a comfortable life for any given set of principals, but I know many people who would fight if they were in a bad situation and felt like there wasn't much to lose. this is why a slow erosion of rights is very effective, by the time you get to the point you are willing to resist, you have given up enough rights that it becomes difficult or impossible.
But if you really want to know what asymmetric warfare looks like, unfortunately it looks very ugly. The populace doesn't appear to give any indication they endorse the results. I honestly think most people would be very much worried about the legacy their reputation would have; even if they fought for a cause they believed in and avoided collateral damage. The combination of nearly universal social shaming for taking violent action (except when police do it, then it is "valorous"), consolidation of federal power, and the complete ineffectiveness of voting in slowing erosion of rights has been a deadly trifecta for individual rights such as the erosion of fourth and second amendment protections.
In WACO a few "lunatics" took up the time of well over 1000 officers + a lot of hardware and well over a month. And this was just a few people with guns.
The goal isn't necessarily to be able to stand up to the military, but rather to make a tyranny as unappealing and arduous as possible. I have a writeup somewhere, but can't find it atm, so I'll get back to you with it later.
Also: It was meant more as an example that the 2nd provides a way to make it infeasable to practice tyranny over the US population through the military.
Edit: My point here is that this is another example where private gun ownership allows upstart tyrannies to defend themselves. This is a negative example, not what handrous was seeking.
I am not defending child brides. But to me, it seemed like a VAST governmental overreach to be there in the first place. Where after the fact they tried to make the davidians look less sympathetic through the allegations. I came to this conclusion because those allegations never, not once, showed up before the siege.
My point was that a few dozen people tied up over 1000 agents for over a month + lots of other resources. If just a few dozen such cases happen at or near the same time, it'd basically paralyze the whole governmental military apparatus.
Also: I found the post again that puts my thoughts into good wording: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/483595139562995722/88...
See Afghanistan. Full might of US military couldn't permanently suppress the will of the people. And afghans were significantly less wealthy, armed and organized than gun owners in america.
There is no way the police and military could occupy the US without the support of the people. They would win every battle and lose the war, like Vietnam and Afghanistan. The modern military is very dependant on supply chains, and would collapse after 6 months if US workers revolted.
Not to mention the massive defections if ordered to fire on their own people (why we swear an oath to the constitution and not an oath of allegiance to military commanders).
2) Slightly worse example: Nationalistic unorganized militia in the Ukraine during the latest war in Crimea and Donbas.
3) US example? Battle of Athens (post WW-II) [1].
When I really start thinking about it, there are almost too many to name; especially if you count the times where there was an attempt but it failed.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-se...
https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/nutrition-crisis-looms...
When I was growing up seat belts weren't mandatory and oh boy did people protest that change in the law. Not long ago I visited a developing country where nobody even thinks about wearing seatbelts. And I was aghast. How can they not take such a simple precaution. And child seats? They ride on motorbikes with their kids on the front with no helmet!
The answer obviously is there are a lot more things that they worry about than getting into an accident. Things like losing their job and having to beg because there is no safety net. Things like getting sick and affording healthcare.
And as medical treatments advance even further you'll see even more resources thrown at even smaller problems. That's just how it is - we tackle health issues at the margins and as we become more wealthy we're willing to sacrifice more resources to tackle smaller problems.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9755781/Covid-Weste...
Voting to ban free speech wouldn't really be a democracy for long in any real sense. If you can't talk about the candidates openly you can't really say people are actually making an informed choice.
I feel that a lot of what comes with the "Western Model" of democracy is there because if you don't hold those norms, things can slip into non democracy pretty easily. If you can ban free speech, impose curfews, legislate to murder people or oppress minorities- the political system will not be stable, and so long term it actually won't be a democracy.
But any sane person can see that's not the case here. It truly is an exceptional circumstance, and there is no legitimate long term threat to Australia's democracy from collectively agreeing to impose a curfew in order to deal with a health crisis. The author is trying to conflate the two so you feel the uneasiness that you would if the government had a curfew to suppress unrest. But they're not the same.
1. You're followed all the time, your gadgets spy on you, you're translating your geo position and your correspondence all the time to Google, Facebook, Apple.
2. Your only sources of information are either Google results that are obviously rigged, or social network posts which are also rigged. Owners of FAANG has their own political views that they impose on all the users of the networks. Traditional media are not as influential as before, but they also belong to a very small circle of stakeholders with their own agenda.
> the political system will not be stable,
Why not? If the oppressor class is big and cohesive enough, and does not care for the oppressed, there's no reason for them to stop and nothing could force them to stop, short of violent revolution or outside intervention - they would always maintain the majority.
> there is no legitimate long term threat to Australia's democracy
How do you know that? I think collectively agreeing to suspend basic human rights for reason A would make it very easy to agree to suspend basic human rights for reasons B, C, D, E, ..., Z - and then, what is left from the democracy? Voting? See above.
But that's exactly what happens when you start murdering people and a significant minority knows it can happen to them.
How do you know that? I think collectively agreeing to suspend basic human rights for reason A would make it very easy to agree to suspend basic human rights for reasons B
I don't think the default position is just a slippery slope. I think someone making this argument should have to show some evidence why you think Australians would agree to impose a curfew for some more sinister reason now other than just "we're used to it". Because we aren't. Despite agreeing to it for public health reasons, in absolute terms people are NOT happy with it. I'd argue the opposite: like a vaccine prepping your immune system, being forced to live with curfews may very well strengthen our resolve to not go through this again if it can absolutely be avoided. Lockdown fatigue is a very real thing here and anyone suggesting lockdown for political or other nefarious reasons (as the author tries to imply) very well could find it now harder than previously.
I feel like they're reporting from a parallel ddimension, but I had this vague impression of them being a quality publication. Did they change or was I wrong?
As it turned out, the bet paid off. Had it behaved rationally and adequately valued liberty, a rich nation like Australia would have spent lavishly—before knowing which vaccines would turn out to be most effective—to secure an adequate supply of many options for its people. It could afford to eat the cost of any extra doses and donate them to poorer countries. Australia then could have marshaled its military and civil society to vaccinate the nation as quickly as possible, lifted restrictions more fully than Europe and the United States did, and argued that the combination of fewer deaths and the more rapid return to normalcy made their approach a net win.
Instead, Australia invested inadequately in vaccines and, once it acquired doses, was too slow to get them into arms. “Of the 16 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine that have been released to the government by manufacturer CSL, only about 8 million have gone into the arms of Australians”
The federal government is incompetent and lazy and thought because they had dodged one bullet they were bullet proof.
https://micky.com.au/aussie-ex-pat-will-never-return-after-d...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2tOye9DKdQ
it's worth 1 minute of your time.
Any goverment should stay clear from using propaganda. This comes down to means and ends and the elitist thought that "we" know better than "them" where "them" are the unwashed masses. The citizens must be treated like responsible human beings and given the information and clear instructions on what is expected of them, not an emotion charged movie clip.
And incidentally, the past couple of years shook the last bits of trust I had in the "establishment", and I mead media as much as politicians and administration. Saying that masks are useful was strongly discouraged in early 2020. Saying that the virus _might_ have passsed through a lab was actively censored on facebook. War on terror "exceptions" are still in place, and we've even left Afghanistan.
Yeah, the risk of losing family members is beginning to look like the reasonable option here. No joke or hyperbole.
Also, we have (plenty of) vaccines. Australia is sitting right now on a stockpile of millions. Vaccines reduce the risk of death to a pre-covid flu. This makes social appeals to obey moot - people already have a way to protect themselves. If for some reason the haven't (vaccine hesitancy for example), that's on each individual. No longer a social obligation to protect the vulnerable, like it was a year ago.
Australia has had ~1000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, the USA is well north of 600,000. Y'all enjoy that tasty, tasty freedom.
Sounds pretty free and democratic to me.
My entire family (mum, dad, sister, in-laws) is also fully vaccinated, but we're not allowed to visit them either.
I'm not sure why, but there is a fairly large (though diminishing at this point) group of people who will back to the hilt every single abrogation of freedoms perpetrated by this Government. You can find them at reddit.com/r/australia. They will dismiss and trivialise your concerns. "Get over it, it's just a mask lol! It's not too much to ask!" I suspect most of them live in the inner-city, where there's plenty to see within their 5km radius, and they have had steady work throughout the pandemic.
For some people, it all adds up, and it is too much to ask. My brother-in-law has been out of work for most of this pandemic. We found out a year into the pandemic that while my sister-in-law has been going to work, he's been drinking bottles of gin every day. He took up bike riding and got _seriously_ into it. Then they announced the 5km limit, and his nice peaceful ride between this town & the next turned into boring loops. He relapsed on drinking shortly after.
Recently, the state Government closed playgrounds, based on the erroneous belief that they were a source of transmission. To date they have produced zero evidence of a single case transmitted at a playground. Once again, concerns about this were trivialised. I saw on Reddit a bunch of people saying stuff like "I bought a little playground online and set it up in the backyard and my kids love it!" or "I gave them chalk and they're having a blast!", just trivialising any concerns people had about the closures.
My wife is a teacher at a fairly rough school. It's all remote. A lot of her students come from troubled homes, and their behaviour reflects that. She works with a few of the boys to come up with "plans", stuff as simple as "when I feel really angry, I'll go for a BMX ride". Sounds silly but it really helps them blow off steam. Well all the bike parks are closed now. Should we blame these boys when they start smashing things instead? Many of her students are completely disconnecting from school. She rings their parents, and the parents either don't give a shit, or say stuff like "my child won't even get out of bed, I don't know what to do."
There is a legitimate mental health crisis going on right now. My sister-in-law is a psychologist specialising in troubled kids. She says the self-harm and suicide is through the roof. And by the way, it doesn't help that she has to treat these kids remotely ("telehealth". She works from the clinic, but all the appointments are remote). Of all things needing face-to-face contact, you think this would be it!
There's going to be a reckoning. I can feel it in the wind. A lot of the hardcore lockdown supporters are very loud, very vocal, and it can be intimidating to voice contrary opinions around them. But I see it when I walk the streets. I see it in family and friends. Public opinion has shifted, and people are very, very, fed up. We are quiet. But come election day, we will be heard.
Which elections matter in this respect? When is their election day? Serious question.
This is a spectacular social experiment being run in Australia, and I think a lot of outsiders (myself included) are eager to gather some hard data on its fallout.
Federal Election is likely in May 2022 but may be called earlier. State Election is late 2022 I think.
I know several Labor/Greens supporters who are gobsmacked by these lockdowns because they work in areas where they see the detrimental effects on society's most vulnerable. My psychology sister-in-law for example! She would never vote the Liberal (conservative) Party - for her the party "brand" is toxic. But she's absolutely set on not voting for anyone who supports lockdowns.
I also know many "ordinary" folk (not college educated, blue-collar workers) who early on were very supportive of lockdowns and the state Government, but it has genuinely taken its toll on them and they are now sharing anti-lockdown posts on Facebook. I don't know how they will vote because they also hate the Liberal Party.
On the other side of politics, I know many life-long Liberal Party voters who for the first time will be voting for someone else. They believe the party has abandoned its values.
I don't trust any of the polls. On our last federal election, even the exit polls were predicting a Labor Party win! So they couldn't even predict how people would vote by asking them after they had voted!
And the mental health issue can't be dismissed. Singapore just had its highest number of suicides in 8 years.
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/452-suicides-reported...
The average Redditor is a maladjusted 19 year old, living in (and quite reluctant to leave) a dorm room or his parents' basement, who is desperate to feel smarter than his parents.
-- Benjamin FranklinYes, that's where that particular quote comes from but Franklin said the above quote a million different ways in various correspondence about all sorts of subjects.
Christ. You can’t drop rhetoric like that and expect anyone to take it seriously or for it to lead anywhere productive.
For one, it’s an outright broken metaphor. Murder implies intent; death caused by freedom of movement is incidental. Both the law and human psychology treat these differently.
Is there some deeper conversation to be had about positive vs negative rights? Yes. But you’re never going to get there through bad faith rhetoric and broken metaphors.
I largely agree with your statement that rhetoric isn't helpful.
However, interestingly, Driving is a privilege (at least that's how it's framed in Australia) not a right, and you must pass tests to be allowed that privilege, and that privilege will be revoked if you misuse it.
Is it an essential freedom to not wear a mask? I think not. you may disagree.
If is an essential freedom to leave your home? I'd say 99.999% of the time yes but exceptions do exist.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
-- Rooki
Guess what? Everybody dies someday. If you are not elderly over weight or diabetic or unlucky then your risk of dying of covid is small.
Get on with life get vaccinated if you want to and stop asking (no, coercing) others to cater to your paranoia.
Really i wish we just stopped giving hospital spots to unvaccinated covid patients. I think then we would go back to "normal". For what ever reason decision makers keep trying be empathetic to people who can't be bothered to care about them selves
You can get lung cancer, it could be from smoking, but it could also be from living in a city or next to a highway. if your in a hospital with covid its pretty much only because your unvaccinated at this point.
Instead he's writing about a subject he knows nothing about, save an afternoon's googling. Completely oblivious to the State/Federal power dynamics, some purile talk about freedoms, completely swallows the conservative spin about why Australia is so far behind in vaccination.
When you read something in the Atlantic about another country, from a correspondant in the US, just know that it is a dog licking its balls level of analysis.
Investing in vaccines/therapeutic treatments would have been a fraction of the cost and some countries just don't want to pay the tiny cost(compared to the alternative of complete lockdowns). You have the EU trying to pay the absolute minimum for vaccines(which contributed to their glacial rollout and extended lockdowns). And Australia with its minimal vaccine purchase.
What is concerning is once a government thinks it can wield the power of extreme lockdowns it will never surrender said power. "We are doing this with your safety in mind, do not complain or deviate from our orders". Given a variant of covid seems to be popping up every 6-8 months would South Australia keep their population in perpetual lockdown, and forced use of that horrible app? Scary times we are living in now.
A year and a half ago there were tons of people who agreed with you. Those people were told their opinions were unwelcome.
Indeed when you look at it this way it doesn't make sense at all.
Consider the possibility of vaccine passports leading to CBDCs, negative interest rates and perhaps even social credit scores. All of these are now possible thanks to the germ of the pandemic. Actors involved have been advocating for these solutions for more than a decade. For me, this makes more sense.
There are people who did not leave their domiciles between March '20 and June '21. These people still got money deposited in their bank accounts, had invisible people deliver their food, and throw away their trash, and maintain the buildings they live in. All they saw were people on TV telling them how justified they were in their stance. They have no clue what impact anything has beyond their front-door.
I wouldn't say Australia purchased the minimum amount. The two vaccines they settled on (very similar to the UK strategy) were AstraZeneca and Pfizer. With a population of ~26million people, they secured 10 million Pfizer doses in November 2020 and would cover the rest of the population with AstraZeneca as the global supply of Pfizer was severely constrained and Australia, being essentially low-risk, had very low priority compared to other countries. In February 2021, the government secured an additional 10 million Pfizer doses and another 20 million in April 2021. 20 million of the 25 million population would be covered on Pfizer alone, and once local manufacturing of AstraZeneca ramped up, the entire population again essentially have access to AstraZeneca. I don't recall the exact numbers, but I believe at one point we were producing a million AZ doses a week. AZ was never supply constrained.
Where it all went wrong though was that since Australia had near zero COVID risk locally, the Australian Immunization Advisory Group weighed up the risk of AstraZeneca clotting against chance of contracting the disease, and put out advice recommending Pfizer as the preferred vaccine for everyone under 60 (putting it simply, as this age changed several times).
Since Pfizer is not manufactured locally, this set back the entire vaccine roll-out, and put us at the mercy of Pfizer global supply (of which we already had more than enough contracts, but had to wait for fulfilment).
He specifically said there would never be drive-thru vaccine sites, no "mass vaccination" centres, etc. etc.
He honestly thought a head in the sand approach would be best, and now over half of Australia's population are in a strict lockdown (can't go more than 5km from home) because of his uselessness.
The leaks that led to the lockdowns came from hotel quarantines - which was known to be inadequate, and was always meant to be temporary. But the construction of a specialized facility was not prioritized, leading to two more waves after the first that costed way more than any quarantine facility would've costed had they expediently built one.
Casting our minds back to last year, we were obviously all too naive in thinking this would end sooner. Some states already getting raked over the coals for lax handling of the hotel quarantines, which government would be willing to take the blame splurging on facilities that may end up going to waste during their term in power? Yes, such facilities would have let us kick the can down the road long enough for a higher rate of vaccination. Taking on that risk was far from an easy call without hindsight though.
I’m also not aware of any country making such facilities, which is also telling.
The better measure, in my opinion at least, would have been upgrading all hotel ventilation systems to a set standard based on the literature at hand, and for all rooms to be negatively pressurised. Coordination of people in and out of the hotel could also be massively improved.
The doses were bought, and a rollout planned… and then amended when the side-effects of AZ outweighed the risk of contracting covid while local cases were less than 300.
I don’t see political spin being a “major contributing factor” when the work has been done, and doses secured. It certainly makes for low hanging fruit though from the detractors that don’t have solutions.
This requires that there is no ownership of property and each person's consumption is carefully metered. "In the future you will own nothing and you will be happy", as the WEF has been saying. Adjustments can be made based on compliance (e.g social credit score). The first stage of this is lockdown until consumption is reduced to targeted levels via the ruse of insanely disproportionate coronavirus restrictions. After the vaccine passports are fully implemented, the system and its AI god can go to work rationing just enough to you to live.
This is all pretty out in the open, they are just lying about how excited the world is to unconditionally embrace sustainability and equality of consumption as a guiding principle for all human activity. : https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/09/klaus-schwab-christin...
There will be some good things that come out of it. The whole social hierarchy will be flattened. Since consumption will be strictly controlled no matter how much money you have, there will be very little social inequality and use of the planets resources will be based on not violating the laws and doing pro-social, pro-environment actions.
For example, you will not be able to use transport unless there is an explicitly justified need. Foreign vacations will be eliminated. Luxury and recreational goods and foods will be a very rare indulgence, regardless of how much money you have.
I'm just helping HN get ahead of the curve here. This stuff is steamrolling out so fast and effectively, especially in Australia that I can't think anyone can do anything to stop it.
The funniest thing is watching North Korea's response to the pandemic. It's like they didn't have to change anything. They just rejected 3 million doses of donated vaccine! They also report 0 Coronavirus cases. It's like Kim is saying "hey guys, we're already at the finish line, we don't need that coronavirus panic to get there." https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/sep/1/north-korea-...
Will it?
> Since consumption will be strictly controlled no matter how much money you have, there will be very little social inequality and use of the planets resources will be based on not violating the laws and doing pro-social, pro-environment actions.
Will it? Or will the rules not apply to those with enough money? Will they still fly to Davos in their private jets and devise more rules to cut down on how much carbon the rest of us emit?
Indeed, they all advocate for lowering the world's population. Today this is rationalized through the lens of climate change, but the goal preceded the climate scare.
Those were the days.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925755387/unfettered-free-spe...
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/npr-trashes-free-speech-a-brie...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/what-covid...
Carbon taxes are kind of a non-starter for real climate lockdown advocates because they go to governments who spend them on all sorts of corruption and waste. The carbon has to remain in the ground, not simply be redistributed.