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Comment by slowmotiony | Hacker News Reader

> The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases.

So the government can effectively just inprison you in your own house, with no proof, no recourse and no due process, because they suspect you were near some guy at some particular time some days ago. They don't even ask to get tested first! How can people on hacker news of all places not see this as a massive threat to civil liberty is beyond me.

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When the alternative is thousands and thousands of deaths, most of us are willing to temporarily give up a bit of civil liberty.

temporarily...almost always those measures stay in place much longer

Based on what examples?

WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the war on drugs, the war on terror, now the war on covid.

I'm trying super hard to decipher your message.

Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post WW2, the same.

Korea and Vietnam didn't leave behind any long term repression that I remember.

War on drugs and terror, ok.

Covid is a disease. We have vaccines, we'll have treatment. Just get vaccinated. We've had pandemics before, they always end and I can't remember any rights still taken away abusively after the Spanish Flu or SARS or HIV.

You are mistaking extending special rights to minority groups with citizens rights. We have been increasing minority rights as fast as possible with removing all the protections from dictatorships in the name of, I don't even know what.

>Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918

>Post WW2, the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act

And on and on. There are libraries written about this, but no one cares because there has been a bi-partisan consensus that citizen's rights need to be curtailed.

Do you even read your own links?

> As part of a sweeping repeal of wartime laws, Congress repealed the Sedition Act on December 13, 1920

The second wasn't a wartime act and even that was repealed. Talk about cherry picking.

He meant the Espionage Act, which is currently being used to seek prosecution of Snowden and Assange, among others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917

Yes, it's hard to keep track of which act was used to curtail what freedoms.

The Sedition Act was used to silence opposition to conscription and gave us the immortal quote of "The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States

Of course the 'fire' in that case was this letter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States#/medi...

Which seems like an extremely level headed question about conscription in the US given that involuntary servitude should only be a punishment for a crime.

15 days to slow the spread

And what would have done instead? Said 900 days to stop the spread? :-)

So, you are saying they were internationally lying and it was a good thing? Boiled frogs?

Well, I hope you won't be regretting it soon when you find out it's not temporary.

Where are you going to post your retraction when it is just temporary?

I'm still waiting to post my retraction about the U.S. never repealing the Patriot Act. I'm pretty patient though.

> When the alternative is thousands and thousands of deaths, most of us are willing to temporarily give up a bit of civil liberty.

Don't worry, you'll be doing both and it won't be temporary.

Please explain.

The death rate for Covid in even a fully vaccinated population is somewhere between 2 to 8 per million per day given Israel's current figures. Which means from 700 to 3000 deaths per million per year.

And you won't be getting the freedoms you gave up back, since the police are already using your location data to arrest you: https://theconversation.com/police-access-to-covid-check-in-...

We are way past temporary here. Australia is not as far along in vaccinations as other countries, but at this point the most vulnerable have had ample chance to be vaccinated. The virus can't be eradicated, will continue to mutate, and herd immunity by vaccination alone is not likely. At some point, Australia, New Zealand and China will need to join the rest of the world in the new normal, unless they want to become virtual prison states.

Yeah, and that point is when we have enough people vaccinated. Which should be done by December. Then we can join the new normal. I would classify that as temporary.

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