[ehnto]

The borders are closed so it's a choice you have made to enter the country and require quarantine, you know what you signed up for it is made abundantly clear.

I think if you asked the majority of Australians they would say that they are happy people have to quarantine at the hotels and that they be guarded, since most of our outbreaks have been from quarantine breaches. So as far as a democracy goes that's right on track. Democratic doesn't mean individuals can do what they want, it means the whole community is involved in setting the rules for the community.

They weren't guarded by police at the start, but non-compliance and malpractice from the regular security guards had the community complaining about having such lax security.

[throwawayfear]

So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

What would have been the case if you asked the majority of Germans what they thought about certain restrictions in the 1930s?

Democracy is more than the "whole community setting the rules for the community." It is the rule of law in preserving the rights to life, liberty, and justice for all people. In the form of negative rights and the freedom to live as an individual unfettered by a mob of the majority. What you are describing and proposing is mob rule that subjects the 49% or fewer to tyranny.

And actually, what you're describing will subject 99.99% to tyranny because you are building a system of enslavement that will serve just the cream of the crop and crush everyone else.

Say it out loud. "They should have listened and the regular security guards should have been complaint! Now we need to use military officers to patrol and enforce." Say it out loud so you can hear what you're actually saying.

[plugger]

> So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

FFS. So you're ok with hundreds of thousands (660,000 so far in the US) of people dying for your freedoms compared to the 9 (YEP, NINE) deaths we've had in Western Australia from Covid?

Democracy isn't some mask off individualist system where your perceived individual rights trample the rights of the wider community to stay alive, despite the deep throated bellowing coming from a media more concerned about stirring controversy to drive revenue.

You keep your freedoms. You freedoms to shoot each other rampantly with all your guns; your freedoms to have your police shoot and kill you without repercussion. Your freedoms to not get vaccinated and die from a virus that has an easily sourced vaccine readily available.

We'll take our sane approach to zero community spread of Covid and our two years of billions of budget surpluses. Who would have thought that having no community spread and a wide open economy would result in such financial windfalls? /s

All this app does is allow for people to self-quarantine without the cops being required to physically check that you're doing so. It's voluntary and allows the police to actually focus on their job instead of constantly checking on self-quarantining returned travellers. You can take you tyrannical Nazi German hot takes elsewhere, we're 100% not listening with our community free of Covid.

[belltaco]

>So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom, because you've consumed media fear-mongering about the pandemic. The pandemic is not deadly enough to justify building a totalitarian regime.

How dangerous do you think covid is? Is it just a common cold like the recipient of the highest civilian award in the US said? [1] Or just a flu like Fox News kept saying[2]?

Are these scenes in Russia[3] and India[4] made up, or are those acceptable when only a fraction of people were infected, and no lockdowns would mean a much worse situation?

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/25/rush-limbaug...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAh4uS4f78o

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kbNGR7XjrY

[4] https://youtube.com/watch?v=D0Y1YakG60s

[Handytinge]

> So you're okay with increasingly stricter subversion of freedom

Yes. Simple as that. Most of us are happy with the trade off of freedoms in this scenario.

Your viewpoint of what defines totalitarianism or miscarriages of liberty are fine, and you’re welcome to keep them or even share them. But you don’t get to don’t get to dictate to others why your fiercely individualistic ideals are definitively are better than the community trade offs being made.

[sadfinger]

Thanks, I appreciate you care about us. Australia has been on this path for a while now but similar changes are happening everywhere. It does feel like a frog being slowly cooked. I would still choose an app at home compared to paying for hotel quarantine though. There are more serious and permanent changes happening with surveillance (every phone number is attached to a government ID, metadata is saved for years, number plates are scanned and logged at state borders etc), indirect crimes (you did something a criminal might do, so that's a crime) or extremely petty things like the defamation law or carrying a 'sharp object' or even not being able to pull the tab when you fill gas to needing an ID to buy a knife from the supermarket. It's not just that they seem to be able to pass whatever weird or overreaching laws but there seem to be little to no legal safe guards or limitations about what they can be used for or when they can be used. There are limited means to civilly object as things instantly become crimes. Is Australia really considered a 'very free' country.

[ehnto]

To be part of a society there needs to be a compromise. I agree not to not to steal things in exchange for knowing people aren't allowed to steal things from me.

That I understand, and the same for the quarantine rules. But things have been getting really complicated lately. As you have pointed out, these agreements aren't feeling like community decisions and technology has been making the application of law humanless and arbitrary.

If I forget to pay for a loaf of bread, walk out the store, and then go back to pay immediately, it would just be a human misunderstanding nd everyone would be happy with that outcome. Societal dues paid.

But if instead a facial recognition camera tracked me leaving and the security gate detected the item unpaid then the matter goes into an automated system and even if I realise my mistake and pay my societal dues the system doesn't care. If we aren't careful it could elevate the system above the society, and lose its original purpose of helping resolve social conflits. Instead it would just apply law without the capacity to fully appreciate it's role of societal mediation.

There are things in Australia that are already like that. Expired registration cameras for example. A police officer can suss out the situation and see if you just forgot to do it this morning, or if you are constantly driving without insurance. The camera can't figure that out, so a simple mistake can cost you.

[amanzi]

"The pandemic is not deadly enough..." I'm curious to know how many more deaths would be required, in your opinion, for it to be considered deadly enough?

[hilbert42]

Right, 'The pandemic is not deadly enough' argument quickly degenerates into a 'how much is a human life worth in dollars?' one. This then leads us down the slippery slope to us losing our humanity.

It seems to me that much of human misery down through the ages can be put down to a small percentage of humanity who thinks this way and we'd all be better off if they had bigger more highly tuned amygdalas to boost their empathy for other human beings.

(This question has always intrigued me, it would be very informative to see sets of normal distributions for given dollar amounts for the population.

Also, given that we're living in COVID times, distribution figures for a virus's infection/replication rate vs death rate per capita, etc. would be informative. Knowing when fear gripped everyone to such an extent that say 95+% of the population would be clambering for vaccinations would be useful if for no other reason than to put vaccination resources to best use. For example, if the death rate for COVID or any virus were one in three as it was for the Plague/Black Death in the Middle Ages, would we then reach a figure of 95+% vaccination rate? Surely such figures would be of great interest to medical professionals and behavioral psychologists.)

[throwawayfear]

I don't know.

[ehnto]

You're extrapolating the pandemic situation out to the rest of societies problems and rules and we just can't have a good discussion like that.

There are ways in which I agree with you about Australia's future and reducing freedoms, especially around technology and tracking. But the pandemic is not trivial, look at countries like India and America that essentially had it run free, that is a lot of death, and it wasn't just covid patients. A health system full of covid patients can't help anyone else either.

The thing is that we have a plan and a path out of this, and it relies on controlling outbreaks until we are all vaccinated. To make that happen, people have to quarantine for 14 days. People thought their happiness was more important than the community and the community disagrees so we had to enforce it.

The community also thinks you can't let rodents live in your restaurant kitchen, and that you can't drive while drunk, etc. Laws often protect the community from the selfish and that is what happened here too. We tried to let people be adults but they left the hotel and caused untold damage to the community, so now they get babysat.

[syshum]

People need to look alot closer to the data in America before they simply blame individual freedom for the deaths

A HUGE percentage of the deaths in the US are from people institutionalized in government facilities. They had no freedom..

Another HUGE percentage of the deaths were people that were already unhealthy, and what I know about Australia you guys do not have them levels of general unhealthy people.

America also has a much high percentage of the population over 65, a group that makes up the majority of COVID Deaths

There is more to the story than simply "American did not impose enough tyranny on the citizens to combat COVID"

[ehnto]

I do agree, the last paragraph wasn't quite what I was suggesting. I honestly doubt you could ever have controlled American citizens enough to curb the spread anyway, much like India had no hope either. I feel it was inevitable. But for whatever reason it was able to spread, the result was that it was deadly to hundreds of thousands of people.

I don't think we gain anything by trying to qualify exactly who it killed, since over 65s are still people, as are institutionalized individuals.

[swiley]

It doesn’t matter why, stop rationalizing this bullshit.

[dang]

Hey, can you please stop posting flamewar comments? You've been flaming up a storm in the last few hours and we ban accounts that do that. I'm not going to ban you right now because everyone goes on tilt sometimes, but please stop now and please don't do it again. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[ehnto]

Stop rationalizing it? So we should make rules based on our feelings instead? Of course it matters why. There is no freedom at all costs, because at all costs would be a lawless badlands. You're already knee deep in a society full of rules that you willingly follow and benefit from every day, now society has a new problem and we're navigating how to figure it out, that's going to take some rationalizing.