The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights • Hacker News Board

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#151

Post by throw0101a » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #115

pbourke wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rational, educated populace doesnt explain away the difference between Italy vs Austria, Belgium & Netherlands vs Germany, the US vs Canada In the case of US vs Canada, perhaps it does. Canadians have a high level of trust in expert civil servants, including public health officials. There is also a general Canadian pragmatism that kicks in: politicians from across the country and across the political spectrum have…

Canada has little population density outside it’s local hubs. The virus isn’t going to spread so easily there outside of localities. The USA has more metro areas that are drivable to each other. It’s easier to spread in the USA. Look at the massive EU numbers and consider their density.

At a country-level, I'm not sure any conclusion can be drawn for density versus (per capita) infection rates:

* https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po...

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#152

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:48 PM UTC

christophilus wrote: post #126

neither_color wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue there's no direct correlation. There are societies with lesser regard for rationality doing just fine too. Several countries not in "the path of the storm" can claim credit for anything they did and didn't do as having stopped covid to the point of superstition. Id credit Germans' preference of beer just as much as their February/March response or their penchant for rationality. It's a form of collective su…

There’s another difference. The US healthcare system has strong incentives to find COVID where there is none, or where it’s irrelevant. They get substantially more money from a COVID death than from a normal death. A guy I know lost his friend to a motorcycle accident, but his friend’s death was officially a COVID death. When you see really strong outliers, you need to at least consider the explanatory power of incen…

[deleted]

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#153

Post by pasabagi » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #112

mrkramer wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how Hitler winning 1932 German elections improved human rights in Germany and overall Europe. Instead it turned into dictatorship, tyranny and mass murder. And you can not say that Germany at the time was not rational and not educated populace. It was a Physics mecca of the world with people like Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger and Albert Einstein. My point is education does not equal to…

World War II has been over for a while and Germany has a scientist as the leader of the country. Human rights in Germany improved as a result of WWII because Germany - unlike any other country - has seen first hand what will happen when you let human rights slide.

I think it's more that Germans, unlike most nationalities, had great psychological and political incentives to imagine themselves as the victims of human rights abuses, but unlike real victims of human rights abuses, didn't face an entrenched establishment designed to keep them from asserting their rights.

It's important to remember that Germans, as in present Germans, are very rarely descendants of those who 'saw first hand' the atrocities of the Nazis, unless you count the perspective of the perpetrators. A large part of the post-war German identity was based around the idea that they did not know what was being done, that they would have never allowed it if they had known, and so on.

My opinion here is obviously controversial (especially in Germany), but it goes a long way to explain why Germany, unlike most post-genocidal nations, has very robust defence of human rights at the core of its state. Most survivors of genocide (e.g. the Armenians) face an establishment committed to defending itself against any assertion of wrongdoing, and a society committed to keeping hold of stolen property and lands. In Germany, there were essentially no survivors, and no advocates for the dead, so there was no real pressure either to bring the perpetrators of the holocaust to justice, or to defend them. In Turkey, recognition of the genocide would have been extremely expensive, both in terms of reputations of establishment figures, and in terms of property and land. In Germany, most Nazis and Nazi businesses (VW for instance) could simply go on.

In any case, I'm not sure how you would respond to the Holocaust within the framework of human rights. Retroactive justice is against the german constitution, and what the Germans did in the second world war was predominantly legal. It would have been very hard, even if there was a great desire to do so, to convict anybody of doing acts which were fully lawful at the time.

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#154

Post by leetrout » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #147

christophilus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you. I have voted for an Nth party every presidential election since I was 18. Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. Every single time, I was told that this was the most important election of my lifetime, and just this once, I needed to bite the bullet and vote for a major party. Not doing it. That entire narrative needs to change.

> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up. I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be signifi…

We need ranked choice voting nationwide.

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#155

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

cwhiz wrote: post #130

In this forum, right here on HN, people routinely espouse desire for more authoritarian restrictions. People gleefully discuss Sweden and almost openly hope that their lockdown-free plan fails. The article makes it sound as if the erosion of democracy is coming from the top. In the USA, it’s coming from the bottom. It’s coming from everyday citizens.

[deleted]

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#156

Post by throw0101a » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:55 PM UTC

roenxi wrote: post #15

econol0dge wrote: post #3

From the article, it sounds like our response to the pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights. The virus is not agentic, and what they describe are intentional acts by human beings.

This has been a consistent theme to responses to major crisis in US has faced in my lifetime - every time, after the crisis the situation is worse than it was before the crisis. Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID. The scars from the first two really should have healed a long time ago. It'll be a pretty dire future if the COVID response…

> Not because of the crisis, but because of the response. 9/11, the 2008 recession (QE is still with us) and now COVID.

Is it a coïncidence that all occurred under a GOP/Republican administration?

Clinton treated the 1993 as a crime instead of an act of war, and prosecuted those that were responsible:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_World_Trade_Center_bombin...

Meanwhile Bush (really Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz) went galavanting into other countries.

Obama was hamstrung by a GOP Congress with (so-called, supposed) deficit hawks that were screaming about deficits, debt, and austerity… which they promptly abandoned they were in power to pass the giant December 2017 tax cut bill:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Cuts_and_Jobs_Act_of_2017

Of course now that Biden looks likely to win they're reverting to form:

> The short version: A Senate GOP strategist privately confided to Bloomberg that a key Republican goal right now is to lay the groundwork to revert hard to austerity, should Biden prevail, crippling the possibility of any serious stimulus efforts next year, even amid continued economic misery.

* https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/14/how-repub...

Paul Krugman has an entire section on this in his latest book Arguing With Zombies.

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#157

Post by watwut » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #113

neither_color wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue there's no direct correlation. There are societies with lesser regard for rationality doing just fine too. Several countries not in "the path of the storm" can claim credit for anything they did and didn't do as having stopped covid to the point of superstition. Id credit Germans' preference of beer just as much as their February/March response or their penchant for rationality. It's a form of collective su…

I haven’t really understood the certain praise the EU has received by the USA media. The EU as a whole is similar to the USA and has done just as good/bad as the USA. Similar number of deaths. The USA has more cases but I suspect the EU has just not tested as much previously. There’s no reason to suspect the EU would have a higher death rate (USA has more confirmed cases but fewer deaths$. But today EU case totals ar…

Why do you think EU is testing less then USA?

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#158

Post by chongli » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #151

nemo44x wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has little population density outside it’s local hubs. The virus isn’t going to spread so easily there outside of localities. The USA has more metro areas that are drivable to each other. It’s easier to spread in the USA. Look at the massive EU numbers and consider their density.

At a country-level, I'm not sure any conclusion can be drawn for density versus (per capita) infection rates: * https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/covid-19-death-rate-vs-po... See also: > We also find that after controlling for metropolitan population, county density is not significantly related to the infection rate, possibly due to more adherence to social distancing guidelines. However, counties with higher densit…

I think that’s because population density is notoriously hard to measure. The problem is that most countries have a mixture of big cities, rural areas, and uninhabited wilderness. Taking the total population and dividing by the total land area does not tell you anything useful about the actual proximity in which most people live in a country.

On that scatterplot you linked, Canada is way down there in terms of population density. Yet the vast majority of Canada’s land area is uninhabited wilderness to the north. Most Canadians live within a narrow band of cities running parallel to the U.S. border. In addition, a significant minority live in many scattered rural areas outside of that band.

So the question is: how do you measure Canada’s true population density? Do you only look at the high density band? Or do you include the rural areas? Where do you draw the line between rural and wilderness? There’s no easy answer.

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#159

Post by smichel17 » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

u801e wrote: post #147

christophilus wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m with you. I have voted for an Nth party every presidential election since I was 18. Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. Every single time, I was told that this was the most important election of my lifetime, and just this once, I needed to bite the bullet and vote for a major party. Not doing it. That entire narrative needs to change.

> Every single time I was told that I was throwing my vote away or voting for one of the major party villains. The refrain essentially is that you must vote for the candidate we say is most likely to win and if you don't, then you're helping the next runner up. I believe that if we no longer reported polling results and had election results reported at the same time, then the problem I describe above would be signifi…

Reduced? Probably. Meaningfully? I don't think so. It's baked in to the system: if your equivalent (nth party voter) on the other side of the political spectrum switches their vote to the mainstream party and you don't, then the mainstream party you're more aligned with is disadvantaged. There's nothing subjective here; it's just how the system works.

We desperately need a voting system that allows you to express your preferences honestly, and ideally across all candidates, without hurting the outcome. By far, score voting systems are the best at that. Of those, I recommend STAR voting (Score Then Automatic Runoff), because it has some actual momentum[1] (it also has some theoretical advantages, but both it and vanilla score voting, and even Ranked Choice with a Borda count, are such a massive improvement over the status quo that it doesn't matter which we pick).

[1]: https://www.starvoting.us/ -- no affiliation, just convinced by the research (edit: which you can mostly find linked from https://www.equal.vote/)

Re: The pandemic has eroded democracy and respect for human rights

#160

Post by nemo44x » Sun, Oct 18, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #157

nemo44x wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven’t really understood the certain praise the EU has received by the USA media. The EU as a whole is similar to the USA and has done just as good/bad as the USA. Similar number of deaths. The USA has more cases but I suspect the EU has just not tested as much previously. There’s no reason to suspect the EU would have a higher death rate (USA has more confirmed cases but fewer deaths$. But today EU case totals ar…

Why do you think EU is testing less then USA?

I don’t think right now. But earlier in the year. I explained in my comment the EU has fewer confirmed cases but more deaths. This implies that either EU citizens are more likely to die from COVID or that they didn’t test as much earlier. Today their confirmed numbers are massive and I suspect it’s because they are testing more than ever.