Yes.
Read the history of Teddy Roosevelt & the Food and Drug Administration. https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history
If you're familiar with the political culture of Australasia, you'll realise it's an overwhelming "nanny state" culture.
Also, you'll realise that Australia/New Zealand have the highest HDI indicators of any nation globally with mean winter temperatures above 10 degree Celsius.
Why?
Because Australia and New Zealand have a particular cultural value others don't.
They trust technocratic experts to know what's best for people. And implement.
I think reasonable people could object to Australia's internet censorship laws, COVID response, climate activities, etc.
There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).
Victoria recently had an election wherein the government which was responsible for implementing the lockdown was re-elected. Notably, the state government’s pandemic response was dictated by facts, indeed the chief health officer responsible for informing politicians and implementing policy was a medical practitioner and undeniably an expert in public health matters.
During lockdown and even still, there continue to be protests against the government for their pandemic response, despite the re-election being a clear sign that the will of the people is that they want a government led by (or at least informed by) experts who know what they’re doing.
It’s important to note that there are examples within the Victorian government which show the opposite, though. They have aided logging of old-growth forests, despite saying they won’t allow it to continue. They’ve repeatedly and demonstrably used tax dollars to fund infrastructure projects in electorates where the ruling party has a slim majority (so-called marginal seats).
My point is the Victorian government is far from perfect. It’s been a year since the last lockdown ended, yet the lockdown is still the thing people discuss when it comes to policy. It’s the most invasive action a state government has taken, affecting so many people. It’s what people remember. And it mattered at the polling booth last month, when people voted the government back in. They even saw an increase in the seats they hold, from last election.
Again: technology or science experts deal with facts (or implications of setting policy), not setting policy or the will of the people. As an example: COVID can & did kill people, but where to set the threshold for acceptable mortality is a policy issue that is orthogonal. Not dissimilar to actuarial accounting.
Dictated by culture. To say that everyone else was dictated by things-that-weren't-empirical is nothing short of a naive reading of how laws and social policy are set. There are values.
I would heavily challenge this just because the opposition is utterly incompetent in Victoria. I am as against the lockdowns as they come and think they border on criminal as an action taken by the state against citizens. A disgusting violation of human rights I never thought I would see in Australia in my lifetime and honestly changed permanently how I viewed the moral compasses of my fellow citizens.
However they were done and now I have to vote based on what is going forward and the policies put forward by the liberals in Victoria are, frankly, moronic. Matthew Guy is a buffoon who has no place in leading the party.
So I gritted my teeth and voted Labor. But using that as an endorsement of lockdowns or Victoria covid policy is absurd. I know many who feel the same as me and acted similarly.
I'll never vote Greens again until Lidia Thorpe is gone, shagging the heads of outlaw motorbike gangs is disgraceful behaviour for a member of parliament and completely disqualifies Greens as being a serious party from my point of view (at least while she remains a part of the party). And honestly the longer she remains the more I have to question the judgement that the members of the Green party show at all and makes it more likely that even if she eventually leaves I will never vote for them again.
Reason I do like the look of tbh and will consider them going forward. I can't say I am the most hyper-engaged voter so can't pretend I was fully aware of them or what they stood for. But looking them up now I like a lot of what they say and prefer their general policy stances over Labor.
Hear hear. The Victoran Liberals are a bunch of muppets. I disagree with a lot of actions of the Andrews government, however there was no functional alternative.
By no means do they always get it right.
Remember, much of the fourth estate innately will be crassly negative, for commercial reasons. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphlet_wars. New Zealand for example has some remarkably shrill national news stories about remarkably petty crime.
> There's a big difference between being an expert & representing the will of the people (aka policy).
Yes, and the technocrats don't always get it right, at all.
Democracy works because nobody actually trusts the technocrats. Just like nobody trusts the investment bankers, politicians, real estate developers, police, lawyers.
However, Australasia has had a remarkable run of success via eventually doing what the technocrats tell them to do.
The will of the people supports the technocrats.
If you want to look into temperature vs productivity you should note these populations overwhelmingly have ancestry from colder weather climates
It helps to be small & pragmatic. People (mostly) follow the rules and politicians (mostly) only implement rules with broad support. Police have wide discretion to apply laws and (mostly) do this to benefit public good.
That's not to say we don't have problems, of course, but this particular law is seen as a compromise approach to public health that more-or-less works for everyone.
Australia/New Zealand have a... very, very, very deep-seated feeling of inadequacy, comparing themselves to large Anglophile nations.
There's a genetic urge to "impress Mother England."
For Australia, also a deep seated desire to prove they're not an island of criminals.
For New Zealand... a deep seated desire not to be left off maps.
It's not so much size... there's just a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America. To stop people moving away.
Edit: root cause. Not benefit.
The idea that there is a genetic urge to impress England is bizarre, typically about 50% of people support becoming a republic. Some recent data in [0]
Australia's original status as a penal colony seems to be held onto as trivia externally but is entirely irrelevant in modern discussion (as it should be as it stopped 150 years ago). Thinking that this is something Australians think about suggests that you have a very outside perspective.
I don't know what a culture of needing to be a better place to live than America means. I don't think being a good place to live is a culture, I think it's an objective of a society.
[0] https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/support-for-republic...
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Australian_republic_refer...:
"With republican models of one form or another winning a majority in opinion polls prior to the referendum, it was expected that the republican referendum would pass. However, the question put was for a particular model of republic with a head of state appointed by Parliament. This was opposed by some supporters of a republic, who preferred a directly elected head of state. Some of these, such as Phil Cleary, advocated that republic supporters vote "No" in order that a future referendum could be put on the directly elected model. Some commentators—including the president of the Australian Republican Movement, Malcolm Turnbull—identified this split within the republican camp as a key reason for the referendum's failure."
Australia is culturally downstream from America though, so you're right about that.
With 100% devolved individual responsibility, you create market failure.
Nicotine based addition is a pure example of market failure.
To advocate for 100% unhindered individual responsibility, is to advocate against economics.
No rule-free economic market, free of arbitrary constraints, is ever truly rational.
That's because market failure is the default state of nature. The rich take from the poor, the incentive to economically specialize is lost due to theft.
"Personal responsibility" is a gross simplification of the complexities of political and economic science.
I would never simplify the enormous complexities of human computer interaction and UX, fields I know nothing about.
Don't over-simply how difficult a decision regulating nicotine was, and how many decades of academic careers have been sacrificed to come to this consensus.
Cable news slogans can never summarize the efforts of thousands of doctorate wielding technocrats arguing endlessly over the solution to nicotine.
It sounds like you're saying that their freedom to inflict harm on you was more important than your freedom from the harmful health effects of secondhand smoke. Can that be true?
[0]https://businesstech.co.za/news/trending/468724/governments-... [1]https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/17/cigarette-smuggling-th...
Is spanking harmful? It seems close to one of those things that get one into trouble with CPS
What about letting a kid walk home from school on their own? We've seen parents get into trouble for that.
How about letting the kid watch tv or eat too much junk food?
What about teaching them certain ideas, ranging from racism to creationism to socialism to Amish-like beliefs?
If you presume that parents love their children and want to do what's best for them and you inform the population of the collective belief on what is good or bad for them, parents will do their best to make careful trade-offs and are in the most informed and most invested position to make those decisions.
Obviously some people are just terrible parents, but if there's any doubt at all I think we should err on parental sovereignty. Likewise, when considering what is beneficial or harmful to one's self, for the same reason, I think we should err on the side of individual sovereignty.
There are cases where individual or parental authority should be overridden, but to my mind those should be chosen very, very carefully.
Red meat: https://www.healthdata.org/research-article/health-effects-a...
Saturated fats: Nina Teicholz: A short history of saturated fat: the making and CURRENT unmaking of a scientific consensus
I do not understand why so many adult people favor a nanny state; it means to be treated like a child or an idiot and to promote that all people get forcefully treated like this. One should fight this with all means.
Edt: I forgot, that a moderate amount of alcohol each day (i.e. 1 glas of wine) reduces the probability of dementia when one approaches death.
I would disagree. Multiple studies have shown that moderate alcohol consumption lowers HDL cholesterol and reduces strokes. Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.
Source(s)? And who paid for the studies?
>Also, if you use alcohol in a social setting, then you are getting added benefits from human-to-human social interactions where you are likely to have more conversations, talk more, smile more. Obviously those benefits are not directly connected to alcohol - but they pair well together.
Come take a walk through my home town on a Friday and Saturday night at chucking-out time, there's plenty of "human-to-human social interactions", and with a lot less of the "smiling" part.
Presumably even if it's illegal to sell tobacco in a store it could still be legal for someone to possess and use tobacco in a private setting.
Maybe not every personal decision, but certainly decisions that scale should be handled by actual experts. And yes, actual experts exist who actually know more than you and I, and can make better decisions based on the actual data they have gathered and knowledge they have gained, vs our 5minute Internet search.
And much of what you see as a "personal decision" is actually decided by corporate money. When smoking was completely unregulated, corporations advertised and distributed at will. Smoking rates declined dramatically when advertising and distribution was constrained. Yes, we can make a decision collectively to not make certain kinds of harmful activities readily available and pushed on the people by sophisticated influence campaigns.
From the article: >>"Thousands of people will live longer, healthier lives and the health system will be NZ$5 billion (US$3.2 billion) better off from not needing to treat the illnesses caused by smoking,"
Personally, I'm not thrilled to be paying into the insurance system to support the massive healthcare costs of smokers. If they can be made to pay in their FULL cost, then that is fine.
Otherwise, go make your personal decision - grow and cure some tobacco, and roll your own. Nobody is stopping you. The only thing they are stopping is every corner store selling it.
The tobacco companies agreed to have TV cigarette ads banned because there is no real reason for cigarette preference other than what you started smoking (this is why you see ads that were targeted at youth), and they couldn't not advertise when competing with so many others. They figured that if they were all forced to the same level they would save a lot of money while gaining the benefit of a PR win as well as removal of the mandated 1:1 anti-smoking ads.[1]
You can see the same kind of techniques in play with recycling and fire-retardants in corporations getting together to work to legislate things that people think are pro-public-interest but are really pro-corporate with effects on the public ranging from benign to actively harmful.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/01/congress-bans-airi...
How about we compare two bottles of wine every day with a whole pack of cigarettes. I think that's comparable and both would be terrible for you.
I hate smoking, I had a really hard time quitting 8 years ago and in general I dislike being in a room where people are smoking.
However my grandmother smoked 1 cigarette every day with her morning coffee after breakfast her whole life and it did her no harm whatsoever. I think with most substances moderation is always an important factor.
How many cigarette smokers have the willpower to only smoke one a day?
I get that this was probably a tongue-in-cheek question, but like many other things, drinking follows a power law distribution. there are many more moderate drinkers than heavy ones.