Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Amazing. Do you people understand that this is the most oppressive policy ever among any country?

In American movies dictatorships are portrayed as regimes that are able to control every aspect of their citizen's lives but in real life dictators don't do that. This is why there's the myth among the alt-right about how free Russia is. In real life, only the relevant people are bothered and the rest do whatever they want, say whatever they think. Just don't say it at the wrong place.

USA is going for the US style dystopia and the American dystopia is totalitarian.

I'm sure some will think "This is only for the foreigners, it makes sense to know what they are up to". Once you are done implementing it for foreigners you will want to know what citizens are up to because the rhetoric of these people is not only about the "dangerous aliens among us", they talk about traitor all the time. They will want to know who are those traitors to keep them from infiltrating key positions and you have all kind of traitors already. It's not just national traitor, it's also gender traitors, race traitor, language traitors, fiscal traitors, history traitors, religion traitors, traitor traitors.

The speed of US descending into darkness is scary.

The problem is that people don't actually do enough stuff that puts them in adversarial contact with the government to realize how terrible it all is.

That's also the default mode in countries like Russia, Turkey etc. No one bothers you %99.9 of the times, these countries don't have the capacity to enforce total control. With the spread of the internet, things changed a bit and people had realized that they must watch what they say online but it's still based on incidents, i.e. if your tweets go viral you go to jail. Otherwise, no one cares. carry on.

US wants total control, they don't want to be in full know. It's in line with their intelligence gathering practices, it's the American way apparently.

The vaccine mandates were far more oppressive, and I'd argue the individual healthcare federal mandate was also far more oppressive. this only affects non-citizens.

If the federal government were going around asking for citizens social media I'd be more inclined to agree with you. That's not what they're doing though.

I don't know how the vaccine mandates were enforced in US but two wrongs don't make it right.

Why do you think that it affects only non-citizens?

1) You said this was "the most oppressive policy." I gave two examples of more oppressive polices.

2) The vaccine mandates were enforced by having employers fire you for failure to comply with it. It was actually pretty terrible.

3) Visa holders are non-citizens by definition.

> 2) The vaccine mandates were enforced by having employers fire you for failure to comply with it. It was actually pretty terrible.

When I was a kid, I had to have certain vaccines or I couldn't enroll in elementary school. Is that oppressive in your view?

You'll remember those as the good old days when you get fired for sanitary reasons. America has begun ideological checks at the gates, this will spread to weed out the enemy within. They don't have a PCR test for this, the test is your speech history. You will have to think the right way, they will need to be sure that you are not infected with a mindvirus. Today's pathogen is the woke mindvirus but maybe in near future other viruses will be discovered.

>when you get fired for sanitary reasons

Those are private policies, the vaccine mandate was a federal policy. You said you don't live here, take my word for it, there have been far more oppressive policies.

Care to explain? What they did exactly? Is there more to it than “ if you want to come to the office, you must be vaccinated or you need to provide clean PCR test results”?

No. It had nothing to do with RTO and PCR was not an alternative.

There was a federal policy (not legislated btw, just an EO for all the people complaining about Trump using EOs to undo previous EOs) that said any company with federal contracts (which is nearly all tech companies in the US, not just defense contractors) must have 100% of its employees vaccinated. It had nothing to do with safety since there was no provision for remote workers.

Keep in mind this was very early on before they had any reasonable amount of time to even test the vaccines. Forced medical intervention like that as a federal policy is far more oppressive than just asking immigrants and vistors for social media handles, there isn't any debate to be had here.

Where’s is the oppression in that? It’s pretty normal to have health procedures to the best understanding of the threat at the time. It’s pretty straightforward, all kind of professions have all kinds of rules. Can be argued that the understanding or the precautions weren’t right but I don’t see the personal or political aspect of this. Maybe hi-vis vest are also problematic, so what?

Are you upset with the bureaucratic process? On how exactly was implemented? Like the interaction between the officials? Like on lawyer level stuff?

You can't reason with these people. They don't understand science or biologics. They think it's ok to infect someone's grandparents with COVID-19 and kill or disable them (as what happened to my mother). It's their right as citizens, to spread their filth and pathogens to everybody and refuse the vaccine. In short, it's all about them.

This argument has nothing to do with science. No matter how effective or safe the medicine is forcing medicine on people is invasive.

The science you are speaking of is epidemiology, and has everything to do with science. If I can vaccinate enough people, the disease will not spread. It also falls under various terms: The Common Good, Externalities, and the Responsibilities and Duties of a citizen of the United States. We don't just have rights, we have responsibilities to each other, as human beings. I teach this stuff to Scouts but perhaps you missed the merit badge. It's pretty basic stuff, actually.

> It had nothing to do with safety since there was no provision for remote workers.

Citation needed for all of these claims. Please show me this information in the executive order.

> Keep in mind this was very early on before they had any reasonable amount of time to even test the vaccines.

Sorry, the Moderna vaccines were approved under their expedited schedule under the Trump administration in December of 2020.[1] You're complaining about gov't overreach by the same administration as is implementing the above policy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_vaccination_in_the_Un...

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