Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_Switzerla...
In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.
I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.
And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.
Oh, so the law shouldn't be the same for everyone. Not making exceptions for celebrities is "bureaucratic, pointless, vindictive".
That's one way of looking at it. Seems to be yours.
* People who do not have COVID should be allowed to do whatever they like.
* People who are currently known to have COVID maybe should get treated differently.
Banning people who don't have COVID, who likely have immunity to COVID and who have more than enough money not to be a drain on the hospital system is really stupid. Spiteful behaviour just to make a point.
All these restrictions didn't stop 1.1mil ... so far & rising ... cases in NSW in 2 months. They are completely pointless. They didn't do anything. They are a waste of time that do no good and that we do not need. Anyone who cares can go worry about their own personal lockdowns.
There are single digit travellers daily who have COVID. 10,000+ daily local cases. Restrictions on tourists are literally meaningless. And didn't even stop Omicron crossing the border.
This has descended into farce, there is no justification beyond bloody-mindedness at this point.
BTW, I wish you guys luck in opposing your government. Hope our don’t follow.
Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.
Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.
Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.
Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.
I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.
It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
Macron had a huge party at the president office, with people chanting and dancing, not wearing masks, while people were still supposed to take extreme precautions.
The only original thing about boris johnson is that he put minimal numbers of restrictions on his population for as long as he could. For that you can thank him.
There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
And the idea that the US is going to roll over and shrug when their hospital system falls apart is nonsensical. It is one of those sounds-scary-not-likely scenarios that doesn't play out at scale. The part people were initially worried about - ventilators, which can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency - turned out not to even be especially useful in managing COVID.
There are basic questions about whether the hospital system would have been overwhelmed in practice. People keep saying the response was bad, and yet there aren't any instances anywhere in the world I'm aware of where the hospital system really crumbled under pressure. There were lots of instances I heard of where where some people didn't get treated, and that is bad, but not so bad that death rates more than doubled to like ~1% in a local area. And even if the hospital system literally vanished, an order of magnitude worsening from 0.6% still wouldn't get death rates to 10% of the population.
It has been 2 years. We have the data now. 10% was never a possibility although that was less clear in the opening months. Even 1% appears not to have been reached in practice with the worst response policy response of any country in the world.
The hospital system being overwhelmed looks like what you said, "some people didn't get treated". Triage assigns resources to patients based on need, if there are more patients (because there are more COVID cases) or less resources (because medical staff are getting sick too), that still doesn't mean no one is getting treated, just that people who would have gotten treated sooner before now have to wait. And while they're waiting, some of those people would die. People were worried about ventilators, but medical staff can't be quickly scaled up in an emergency either.
Also, of course, all the statistics you're mentioning are with the response.
This was just a trainer pandemic. :-) Imagine one where the children and young people are dying instead of seniors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...
No it isn't: the USA already rolled over and shrugged when their hospital system reached the state (mainly with regards to financing) it was in pre-pandemic.
My elderly father fell in December and broke his hip. Luckily, he got a bed.
A month later, when he fell again in January, there were no beds available. Luckily, he didn’t need one as the fall was more mild. But had he needed a bed, there were none at all.
Nothing was oversold. If we just allowed a free-for-all, the system would buckle and break.
Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.
Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.
I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.
Because the people who didn't want to be vaccinated take up all the hospital and intensive care beds, leading to many postponed surgeries.
E.g. in The Netherlands in October, unvaccinated people took 70% of the intensive care beds allocated to COVID patients, while only being ~16% of the 18+ population. [1]
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
For the last 2 years, these same officials have telling us that we have no choice but to give up our freedoms, civil liberties and bodily autonomy because there aren't enough hospital beds. This was a manufactured crisis (even beyond the likely manufacturing of the virus in a CDC-funded Wuhan lab).
1975: U.S. population: 219 million Hospital beds: 1,465,828 Ratio: 1 bed per 149 people
2019: U.S. population: 334 million Hospital beds: 919,559
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185860/number-of-all-hos...
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
It’s a bit hyperbolic at this point, don’t you think?
As the statistics show, no. Though luckily, things are changing now that Omicron is dominant, so I think all limitations are lifted pretty soon here.
[1] https://www.rivm.nl/nieuws/ongevaccineerde-COVID-19-patiënte...
All because the hospitals and IC are full of people who chose not to vaccinate but who do get priority for medical care.
The amount of yearly cancer deaths is similar, but higher, than Covid.
I’m more familiar with hospitals giving cancer patients ultimatums to face icu, surgeries, and intensive treatments alone - and I saw this in an underwhelmed hospital well before there were vaccines.
Those are independent properties. If you don't see the distinction you will be hopelessly lost in these discussions.
If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic.
To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.
If you want to ensure very basic rights, small government is fine. If you want affirmative action and all that jazz, then you’ll need big government. That will likely abuse tools meant for good to make society not free anymore.
I would agree with you that a free society is one that protects peoples rights. But... somewhere along the lines of social media and virtue signaling, protecting peoples right slowly transformed from the 'No-Harm principle' to 'Comply with X_Dogma or be canceled!'. This tendency has stiffled debate, taken away rights and shown the deep flaws in the democracy of a mob. Atleast in the US and the UK, these power structures that we have put in place are not for the people but are for the politicians within that government. If you are a democratic aspiring politician showing you can enforce paternalistic arguments among your populace is the key path to power.
in Democracy, as soon as you put someone in 'Power', the path instantly diverges between 'By the people' and 'I think therefore i am'. With the creation of an institution, it becomes an entity in it's own right. It believes that since the people bestowed this power upon them, it is their moral responsibility to protect the people.
Case in point - Smoking cigs are bad for your health and 80% of the people agree... So lets ban cigarettes!
While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!
Since this pandemic thing can happen again at any time, we might as just wear our masks forever. It's a minor inconvenience, but think of how many lives you can save!
Also, this whole Covid thing really showed that there are deadly things out there that we don't understand, and since vaccine effectiveness does not seem to resonate with people we are going to break into your house and force jab ya! Oh, Vaccine effectiveness waning... Well we designed this cocktail of immunities! Mandatory for any employees in a company over 1!
Also, since we are on the discussion of democracy... Do you think we can slide in alittle bill that says all mexicans gotta go back to Mexico? Think we can get 51% of the population to agree with the "We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence!"
... Default::default("more racist, paternalistic, irrational arguments that democracy can concoct")
Smoking is kind of a bad example here. Smoking has obvious secondary effects, i.e. secondhand smoke. I have no problem with tobacco smoking being banned from shared office spaces and other common public spaces. Sure, maybe make it possible to get somewhat easy permits to allow for things like smoking lounges, certain kinds of bars, etc. but overall I still consider it a positive that nobody is smoking at my office, movie theaters, practically all restaurants, on the train, etc.
You should have the right to inhale whatever the hell you want. But you don't have the right to force me to breathe whatever you're wanting to inhale.
This position puts you far to the liberal side of any existing internationally recognized democratic government; all of them currently place restrictions on what you are allowed to inhale, and contrary to vkou's point in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30230039, that doesn't seem to be the only alternative to ceding power over what you inhale to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs.
Yes, please.
> While we are on this topic, everyone agrees that endlessly scrolling instagram is also bad, so let's put a time limit on social media - Everyone gets an hour a day!
Wrong conclusion. (What, you wanna cut my HN procrastination by three quarters?!?) Correct conclusion: Just ban all that endlessly scrolling shit.
Huh? How does that follow? I don't think so. Seems at least as likely that "the government" is just collecting and codifying some of the populace's pre-existing norms.
TL;DR: [Citation needed]
> historically what you see in the death throws of an empire.
Throes.
Fuck knows if that's etymologically just a weird old spelling of 'throws' that has survived only in this particular usage or WTF it's all about, but nevertheless that's how it's usually spelled.
Piet Hein, who coordinated the Danish Resistance (which was, arguably, the will of the Danish people, though even today the Dansk Folkeparti has seats in parliament) satirized the situation in this grook, entitled Majority Rule, in 01969:
His party was the Brotherhood of Brothers,
and there were more of them than of the others.
That is, they constituted that minority,
which formed the greater part of the majority.
Within the party, he was of the faction,
that was supported by the greater fraction.
And in each group, within each group, he sought
the group that could command the most support.
The final group had finally elected,
a triumvirate whom they all respected.
Now of these three, two had the final word,
because the two could overrule the third.
One of these two was relatively weak,
so one alone stood at the final peak.
He was: THE GREATER NUMBER of the pair
which formed the most part of the three that were
elected by the most of those whose boast
it was to represent the most of most
of most of most of the entire state —
or of the most of it at any rate.
He never gave himself a moment's slumber
but sought the welfare of the greatest number.
And all the people, everywhere they went,
knew to their cost exactly what it meant
to be dictated to by the majority.
But that meant nothing, — they were the minority.
⁂
The idea of limited government I described, which is fundamental to liberalism, comes essentially from Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 01689. Rousseau responded in 01762 with the idea you so ably summarize, the absolute sovereignty of the "will of the people", in The Social Contract, calling it "the general will": https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/roussea.... Rousseau already recognized the failure mode Hein skewers in the grook above, but he hoped to avoid the formation of political parties.
Condorcet's paradox showed that the will of the people was incoherent in 01785: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox
In 01793, the will of the people decreed that the streets of Paris should run red with the blood of France's greatest and most honorable; Robespierre the Incorruptible carried out this Terror justified by Rousseau: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Terror
In 01850, the will of the people established the Fugitive Slave Act, requiring all government officials throughout the US to assist kidnappers of fugitive slaves, sending them back to the most abominable system of slavery humanity had ever known, a system itself established by the will of the people of the Southern States: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850. A few short years later, the will of the people of the US decreed that those people should start killing one another en masse, ending with about a million dead, but four million delivered out of bondage.
In 01918, the will of the people created the Solovki prison camp, which grew into GULAG over the next decades, through which 18 million people would be forced to labor for the will of the people; some 1.6 million died: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%93%D0%A3%D0%9B%D0%90%D0%93
In 01933, the will of the German people passed the Enabling Act, making Adolf Hitler dictator; before the war was out, the will of the people would murder ten million people in concentration camps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933
In 01951, Kenneth Arrow published his Impossibility Theorem, showing that the idea of the "will of the people" was incoherent in a far more comprehensive sense than Condorcet had ever imagined: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow's_impossibility_theorem
In 01958 the will of the Chinese people manifested in the Great Leap Forward, which Mao justified by explicit appeals to Rousseau's ideals. The largest famine in human history, or possibly the second largest, was the result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
In 01974 Hayek was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for explaining how voters and government institutions are unavoidably laboring in ignorance of much of the information needed to make the decisions that are optimal for the general welfare, while the price system can approximate those optimal decisions more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Use_of_Knowledge_in_Societ...
⁂
The list of atrocities justified by the will of the people goes on and on: the Killing Fields, the Holodomor, the US system of mass incarceration, the Tutsi genocide, the Congolese civil war, the North Korean dictatorship, and on and on. You might protest that these atrocities were not in fact popular, that dictators were lying about what the people wanted; but by and large you would be incorrect. In other cases the policy of establishing limitless state power was popular, but the atrocities in which it inevitably culminated were not.
That is the policy Rousseau advocated, and it is the policy you are advocating in your comment. In 01762 the idea that the will of the people could never err and would always promote the general welfare was an understandable error, but today we have ample evidence, evidence written in rivers of blood, that shows otherwise. Liberalism—giving individual people great freedom to dissent from the will of the people—works less badly. I know it's not very inspiring to chant "Our system works less badly!" but that's the best we can do so far.
This does not necessarily imply "shrinking government", but it does imply strong limits on the powers in the hands of that government.
> in 01689.
> in 01762
> in 01785:
> In 01793,
> In 01850,
> In 01918,
> In 01933,
> In 01951,
> In 01958
> In 01974
> In 01762
You do know that this affectation makes you look pretty darn ridiculous, don't you?
Well, if you didn't, at least now you do. HTH!
I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.