Hacker News Reader

Comment by adityaathalye | Hacker News Reader

Hilariously (darkly), during the pandemic, the very same reason is why the very same administrators were hell-bent on forcing Bluetooth-always-on contact tracing on the whole country's smartphone-carrying population.

(edit: viz. that forcible peer-to-peer bluetooth networking works. One man's unrestricted mass-surveillance is another person's "terrorist activity". Oh how the turntables turn and turn.)

View on HN

But that did save lives; I was able to know my family had Covid before the symptoms showed up. Happened with a lot of other people too.

If they had administered properly people wouldn't have been to the streets and spread the virus in the first place!

Indeed, and it would have saved far more lives if leveraged the app to have hazmat crews come in a forcibly carry the infected to quarantine zones.

Sadly that wasn't possible in the US political climate and maybe a million people lost their lives as a result.

I think they're being facetious, this is basically a distopian movie plot point.

I doubt it, unless their hazmat suits are bullet-proof.

Agreed, and I'm happy to live in a country where this is likely true. The only thing more deadly than pandemics are governments that gained sufficient power to round up their citizens systematically in the name of the public good.

If you think that the 1:30 ratio of guns to people in the US is going to stop the government from doing whatever the fuck they want, you are suffering from a potentially terminal case of optimism. I am an ardent believer in “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”(even though the context was the Penn family bribing the governor to avoid taxation, I still align with both the original and modern meanings), but a “well-armed militia” isn’t doing jack against an FBI task force or god forbid the military, which has recently been deployed in ever more dubiously-justifiable ways domestically.

You say that, and yet insurgents with a tiny fraction of the population using mostly 60s era guns with zero access to the US economy and base logistical stores or sources managed to keep the US on their toes for two decades. A single redneck in Texas with a hunting rifle has 100x more damage potential to the US military and economy than 1000 middle eastern insurgents.

You underestimate how little resistance it takes to make a difference. It's not about every free man in the country single-handedly holding off the might of the US military on his doorstep.

As soon as a single shot is fired in defence, every thug now has to think twice before busting down a door. The game changes. Tyranny becomes a whole lot less efficient.

You send an FBI task force or god forbid the military to interfere with the life of a peaceful stranger and now you've given every man in the country a damn good reason to get himself organised for when they come for his family.

It's clearly not about a flu, at that point.

If they shoot a federal agent that causes an escalation of violence, and future federal agents will be more brutal in response to anything. That loss in efficiency is partially regained by being more violent. That is, in my view, something inevitable when a power structure encroaches too far on those it has power over. But that inevitability doesn't mean you ignore the danger that comes with it.

What it comes down to is can you scare those within the power structure sufficiently enough that they back off before they escalate violence to the point of mass murder? In the U.S. I don't think that you can. It seems that a lot of other people don't either, which is what is delaying people from using violence. There are still enough incentives to be handed out that those capable of committing the harm will escape being harmed by the power structure. When the rewards run out and those who wield arms in service of power become no different from those being harmed, then it will change. The issue is that so much of the world is connected now that those rewards are at no risk of running out, because they can always be pulled from somewhere else.

Please. You could defend yourself from first or second hazmat wearing person that comes to your house, it would be very much different story defending yourself from SWAT team, then remotely detonating drones, finally if it all fails, try to defend yourself against B52.

Didn't actually this happen in China?

Maybe the videos were fake, but I saw at least a couple of this happening.

That was Australia. In China, they welded the doors to their housing units shut.

Really? I suppose you'll be able to provide proof that people were forcibly taken?

Dramatic arrest footage shows police surrounding elderly women sitting on park bench

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/dra...

The arrest of a woman in Australia for promoting an anti-lockdown protest online has drawn criticism, after video of the incident went viral.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824

A Victorian police officer who was filmed grabbing a woman around the neck after approaching her for not wearing a face mask earlier this year will face no disciplinary action.

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/victoria...

None of your three examples provide any evidence of hazmat crews forcibly taking away infected people. In fact, your links have absolutely nothing to do with anything at all. It's reasonable to assume that police would arrest people breaching curfew orders.

Under no circumstances was anyone in Australia forcibly removed by people in hazmat suits.

Circumstances:

> The man had been staying at the Intercontinental, in the centre of Perth, until yesterday afternoon before three officers, dressed in Hazmat suits removed him from his room.

https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/illegal-...

Mirror: http://archive.today/ekWBs

That's someone getting deported and has nothing to do with the claims that people were being forcibly removed into quarantine zones. This just didn't happen.

Your argument seems to boil down to a No True Hazmat Suit fallacy.

Where if the uniform worn isn’t quite right, and the location isn’t quite the same, and the presence or absence of one arbitrary infectious agent doesn’t match the criteria, then Everything Is Okay™.

Australia just used police to move "close contacts" into "internment camps". Any wrong move inside would get punished by a $5000 fine.

> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.

> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility

> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’

> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”

> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.

> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.

> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.

> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.

> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.

> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”

Full interview with recordings from inside the Australian "internment camp" https://unherd.com/newsroom/inside-australias-covid-internme...

Mirror: https://archive.ph/GQDkN

Your source is a site called "Unherd" and the story doesn't exist on any other platform.

And that's a good thing. We're taking back journalism from corporate media.

The story exists when somebody looks into it. UnHeard, which is a YouTube channel with 500k followers, found out about this woman because of the viral social media posts, and interviewed her.

What other platform would you prefer to see it on?

Can we perhaps agree the that the response to COVID, worldwide, was essentially shit. When faced with a true crisis, the People in Charge fucking lost their minds. It’s laid bare for all to see:

Our governments have failed us worldwide.

I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.

There are gradations to failure. And "our governments" and "us" also overlap.

I'm probably more on your side than it sounds based on this comment, but I find it frustrating to encounter learned helplessness dressed in profundity.

Depends on the government.

We go by province, mine was basically keep your distance and wear a mask (yeah, that pretty much was non-existent), whereas another one was; you can enter a coffee shop, but you can't use the washroom, you can buy construction shoes (not boots) in-store, but regular shoes you had to order and pickup outside.

It felt odd while there (I was visiting a friend with health issues).

I'm happy we didn't go too nutso.

Agreed.

I was in the Philippines at the time, we got a repatriation flight to come back to the US but before we were allowed to fly, we had to go all over town, to several offices and get xrays, urinalysis, and basic health screening. The goal was some pointless health certificate required to travel. At the time there were no COVID tests so they somehow thought that having people go all over town interacting with countless people to get health checks that didn't matter or detect COVID made sense...

Was your short term safety at the expense of long term safety? (assuming rights erosion and government failures ultimately harms safety long-term).

Medicine is literally the source of the concept of side effects, the idea that some helpful interventions have simultaneous harmful impacts.

For large-scale infectious disease --- epidemiology and public health --- quarantine and infection/contact tracing are very tried and true containment methods. Yes, these impose costs, particularly on individual liberties. What's key is having a well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy government which makes clearly-justified decisions as to when to impose such restrictions, and when to lift them. Sadly, this has become more difficult in recent years.

Agreed. The theory is there, and even then sounds like it would work like you said if the government was "well-governed, principled, high-integrity, trustworthy". Theory rarely works according to the plan in practice, so as we see today, even if those qualities had been a priority of the government (which I don't think they really are - I think the government in USA acts more like a rich-man's proxy tricking you a lot) we need the plan that accounts for some rough spots or edge cases.

The most consequential public health failure during COVID was the denial that COVID was airborne, based on no scientific evidence.

The infection spread based on being in the same enclosed space as an infected person, and was not based on being only a few feet apart.

Was that 30 second bluetooth beacon ever switched off again?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com