[Proziam]

My hope is that people don't lose sight of the long term in spite of the short term suffering we may experience. You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever. How many movements would have been impossible if a local government could spy on everyone to break it up before it even begins? I'm thankful we didn't have the same technology we have now during the civil rights movement, for example.

I sincerely hope for your swift recovery.

[hrasyid]

> You can only surrender your rights once, the effects of losing those rights will last forever

With an app like tracetogether, you can just uninstall it after the pandemic, right? No need to surrender your rights forever.

[Proziam]

Until the government decides that it's in the public's best interest that such an application be installed on every phone, and non-removable.

We already have NSA / Tech company "collaboration" so this is hardly a huge step in terms of tech or privacy invasion. It would just be the next step.

[throwanem]

Well, that's the thing, isn't it? You can only get sick and die once, but that lasts forever too.

[Proziam]

Put another way, would you want your children to live in a world where their government abused and spied on them? Borrowing from the future seems free at the time, but the true cost can be enormous. Everyone has to make their own value judgment, but I fall on the side of protecting the freedoms of people now and in the future. If people in the future choose differently for themselves, that will be their choice when their time comes.

Of course, 'you can only surrender your rights once' and 'you can only die once' aren't equivalent either. Once a nation of people surrenders their rights, nobody ever has those rights again (even if the loss of those rights costs lives). A person, or a group of people, becoming ill or passing away doesn't take away the lives of the next generation.

If you think back on the experiences of the last century, how much harm would be done if we couldn't freely assemble because a government decided to intervene? We'd have stayed in Vietnam longer, black folks may not have ever won their civil rights, and its possible women would be unable to vote.

For the record, I don't downplay the suffering of illness. I've lost a parent to cancer, as well as many other family members. Everyone else alive is in the same boat. We're all mortal.

[throwanem]

It's not really about what I want or don't want; for one thing, I don't have children and never will.

If I did, though, I suspect I would want them to live.

[Proziam]

I honestly wonder if more people have been killed by dictators and authoritarian regimes or the black plague. I suspect it's relatively comparable. As technology has progressed, I believe it's become more reasonable to fear man more than nature.

[TeMPOraL]

Cancer isn't like a pandemic. Cancer multiply within a body; pathogens multiply within societies.

I disagree with "you can only surrender your rights once"; unlike life, rights can be won back. There's plenty of places on the planet in which you couldn't freely speak or assemble just a couple decades ago, but now you can. Things aren't going monotonically from bad to worse (though I admit, there's a strong directional pressure here; maintaining rights feels like fighting entropy).

I am a parent, I want my child to live in a world where the government doesn't abuse and spy on them, but where that government is also capable of containing an infectious pathogen (whether natural or purpose-made) pretty much as soon as it registers. There is a practical balance to be found there.

(And if we're trading imaginary worlds: I want my child to live in a world where private entities don't spy on them and sell private information, a world where adtech doesn't exist.)

[Proziam]

I want both freedom and a competent government. However, there's no need to spy on people to properly prepare for a pandemic. That said, given that governments have proven to be both incompetent and evil, why should I want to give them more power?

My comment regarding illness is only to reinforce the point that everyone is mortal, and the vast majority of us have empathy for others and value the lives of at least one other person.

> unlike life, rights can be won back

This costs lives. How many wars have been fought to overthrow evil regimes? How many journalists or 'other' people are killed or enslaved in the world today by evil regimes?