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Australia is becoming a surveillance state

ia.acs.org.au

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Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#411

Post by tekknik »

rtkwe wrote: post #325
nemo44x wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually probably easier since the government would be asking its own people to kill its own people. If the local government were in broadly thought to be tyrannical, a guerilla civil war would have a high chance of success. Ask Cuba.

It's impossible to say with certainty which way it will go. There's factors pushing in both directions. You're right there will be some defection from the military to any US insurgent side but there's also a lot of space to draw divisions in the US and given enough people you can assign soldiers to fight places they're not particularly aligned to support. My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories o…

> My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories of a guerilla army winning against any modern military are all on a home turf vs invading army (and the guerilla forces are often heavily backed by outside forces or backed up by an actual regular army like in Vietnam).

Do you think the guns in civilian ownership are to be used for foreign wars? They are exactly for homeland invasion.

And who will back the US with arms? In the examples you gave it’s a richer country, or multiple, helping a poorer country. Who’s going to help the richest country in its death throes? What will be the benefit for all that aid should that nation fall? It’s better to pre-stage the weapons as that also serves to deter those that think the US is inadequately armed.

When presented with historical events supporting these claims your response is “cannot say with certainty”…

The interesting and terrifying part is, if I were China or Russia, I would be online trying to convince the US to disarm itself too.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#412

Post by HKH2 »

refurb wrote: post #408
HKH2 wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean legally. I meant culturally. Are they able to be just as culturally connected as everyone else, or would some people assume they are a foreigner even if they were born there?

My experience there was that if you fit within one of the 3 core ethnic groups people would assume your Singaporean. But if you’re in the “other” group then yeah, people would assume you’re a foreigner.

That sounds like HK.

I guess HK and Singapore are multicultural in that you are rather limited in what you can assume is general knowledge.

They don't seem anywhere near as multicultural as places where you hear a wide variety of ethnic groups using the same kind of accent though.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#413

Post by zepto »

handrous wrote: post #392
zepto wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s obvious they are different. It’s not obvious what differences would render guns useless, which appears to be your position. I’m not asking you to arbitrarily explain how they are different. I’m asking you to explain how and why the differences you are thinking of make guns useless for civilians to own.

Ah, I've got you. Sorry, I probably read poorly or something. Aggregating the differences, part of it is that the stakes are so much lower in a foreign occupation and that withdrawal to save any of several sorts of costs involved is an option that won't result in the toppling of the occupying state's government or loss of any of the occupying state's core territory or sovereignty, and the other part (also mentioned i…

I don’t see the explanation here.

You seem to be restating your position a few times in more words - I.e. that examples of resistance to foreign opposition are not relevant, and that guns wouldn’t be relevant in then scenarios you can imagine.

Can you try condensing the actual argument into a short paragraph?

It’s not clear what scenario you are imagining in which the weapons wouldn’t help. How about just outlining the scenario you are thinking about clearly?

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#414

Post by XorNot »

jjgreen wrote: post #393
XorNot wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But why is the pandemic not ending? It seems strange that with the rollout of vaccines it would last for another 50 years.

You think it can be beaten? I doubt it (and I'm not alone in thinking that). Even if vaccine coverage were 99% everywhere the world (it won't be), and it were 99% effective (it's not) there will still be a reservoir of virus in cats, deer, gerbils ... time will tell I guess, but I think it more likely that our species will accept that it's not going away by declaring it "endemic" rather than "pandemic", as with flu.

A pandemic is the rapid spread international spread of a disease. Key word: rapid.

Question: why is there not a flu pandemic every year? Answer: because the flu is not a novel virus, and does not hit the population in the same way. The flu can be very severe, which is why we vaccinate against it, but within any given population there is a multitude of degrees of existing immunity from previous rounds of flu through the population.

COVID-19 is a novel virus - no human on Earth until 1.5 years ago had ever been infected with it, and it's spread follows the expectation of a novel virus: with no prior immunity, the entire population is initially infectable.

This, obviously however, is not a continuing situation: prior infection with COVID-19 confers immunity against COVID-19, as well as effective immunity against the variant mutations which have arisen. There have not been cases of reinfection within over a year. Even if COVID-19 can infect vaccinated populations, it does so with less severe outcomes, and having done so leaves behind a reservoir of now immune recipients.

In fact even if a new COVID-19 strain arose well after infection, people who had been exposed or vaccinated to earlier strains would not present the sort of completely vulnerable population which the initial COVID-19 virus represented.

COVID-19 is now going to be an endemic disease, but that hardly means people will keep catching up, but instead that in any given year a small subset of the population is likely to contract it and recover - possibly requiring medical intervention, but this is a number which can be managed and planned for.

What has made COVID-19 a problem though, is the novel nature of the virus and it's rapid spread. We are perfectly able to deal with expected loads on healthcare, but not with a surge of 10-20% of the entire population of a country within a 6-12 month window with over a month of recovery time. But against a vaccinated population that figure falls by almost 92-96%, with 60-70% of people never developing symptoms. That is a manageable number over the same time frame.

COVID-19 is not like the flu, and infectious novel diseases will always require immediate and drastic countermeasures. An ideal outcome for COVID-19 would have been containment in Wuhan: it would have lent plenty of time to develop, test, and incorporate into routine vaccine schedules innoculations against it.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#415

Post by joshsyn »

thm76 wrote: post #399
joshsyn wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who pays to support dozens of people who lost their jobs in the name of protecting one guy?

It's not about protecting one guy, but about stopping the spread as early as possible.

So as an individual, it doesn't matter if your livelihood is destroyed because for the greater good of the community?

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#416

Post by anonfornoreason »

brokenmachine wrote: post #389
candiodari wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is a very low limit to the number of people that can be on the other end of the violence, and with guns, that limit is even much lower. When push comes to shove, guns allow normal people to escalate violence to the point the government stops MUCH quicker and faster than without guns.

>Yes, but there is a very low limit to the number of people that can be on the other end of the violence, and with guns, that limit is even much lower. I don't really understand what you mean here? You pull your gun out and threaten a government representative, and you will be dead or in handcuffs within 30 minutes. Maybe your idea of civilian government overthrow could come true if you could somehow gather thousands…

Think less on quick-draw-shoot-the-cop sort of scenarios, and more along the lines of a "the freedom fighters generally live in these hills, and they like to blow us up with bombs or shoot us from far away when we aren't suspecting" situation.

If there was a tyranny and a rebellion, the cops are going to think twice about going out and about without full force since they might be ambushed.

Alot of this sort of situation: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54137838

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#417

Post by kadomony »

L_226 wrote: post #66

Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it. Corporate interests own the media, politicians, food production, education etc. and no one cares, because Life Is Good. Why expect anything to change, or people to care about strong democratic in…

You also just described the USA.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#418

Post by kadomony »

tekknik wrote: post #402
L_226 wrote: post #66

Since leaving Australia (and started living in Europe) I have come to the conclusion that Australia is not a "real" country - it is just a continent owned by corporate interests that happens to also have people living on it. Corporate interests own the media, politicians, food production, education etc. and no one cares, because Life Is Good. Why expect anything to change, or people to care about strong democratic in…

> Decades of bull markets, house price increases, a decline in public education, torpedoed communication infrastructure and complicit "independent" media has resulted in a wealthy, ignorant and complacent society who allow their representatives full control over their lives. It is not that they don't care about these issues, they are not even aware they are issues at all. This is sounding an awful lot like the Dems i…

This isn’t unique to one party. This is American politics. You can’t simply ascribe it to one party because you lean the other way.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#419

Post by rtkwe »

tekknik wrote: post #411
rtkwe wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's impossible to say with certainty which way it will go. There's factors pushing in both directions. You're right there will be some defection from the military to any US insurgent side but there's also a lot of space to draw divisions in the US and given enough people you can assign soldiers to fight places they're not particularly aligned to support. My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories o…

> My biggest point is that all the often cited success stories of a guerilla army winning against any modern military are all on a home turf vs invading army (and the guerilla forces are often heavily backed by outside forces or backed up by an actual regular army like in Vietnam). Do you think the guns in civilian ownership are to be used for foreign wars? They are exactly for homeland invasion. And who will back th…

We’re talking about armed US residents vs US government not a foreign invasion of the US.

Re: Australia is becoming a surveillance state

#420

Post by throwawaylinux »

SuoDuanDao wrote: post #401
throwawaylinux wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's true, then neocolonialism is meaningless as a pejorative. I associate neocolonialism with economic hit men and predatory loans, Now that is meaningless. There are a whole vast range of ways to be exploitative and wealthy and powerful taking from poor and powerless. > not private citizens having the option to leave often abusive governments. I'm talking about the aggregate outcome for the people. The great…

yes, it is. Serfdom is when a peasant has no right to leave his lord's land. If neocolonialism includes recognition of the right to emigrate when another country wants to accept you as an immigrant, it's too broad a definition to be any kind of useful pejorative. The collective outcome may be bad for the country from which people emigrate, but the individual outcome is very good for the people who emigrate. And at a…

I don't know what you want me to respond with, what you're writing is a strawman, it's not what I wrote anywhere.
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