211–220 of 437 posts
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> and get a QR code scanned at every shop, every restaurant How does this work for those who don't own a smartphone?
You can print the QR code too.
And most countries that enforce this are in the EU.
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> the government needs to make voting for federal elections compulsory in order to get people to take a stance / have an opinion (yes, you will get a fine if you don’t vote!) This seems like such a bad idea. Ideally, the democratic process taps ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and allows a society to make reasonable decisions. But all human beings are not capable of contributing to good decision making. Roughly the 15% of peop…
I think your point here would be far stronger without the intelligence argument. I don't want to tell someone they can't vote because they didn't pass an IQ test threshold.
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You don't because you are living in a period where everything is wonderul for Australia. You know what they say: everybody is a genius in a bull market. So you have sun, good food, plenty of money and little immigration. Life is good (if you are not living in the desert naked). Unfortunatly, there is nowhere in the world where things stay nice and easy. The run ended in europe after 1970, it ended in the US after 199…
>>Now, when things are getting hard, having weak democratic institutions, no political awareness and corporate medling is going to hit hard. Many living in democracies will find this true for their country.
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> I think it'll end up more like V for Vendetta. I also love to read this kind of parallel between fiction and reality. However, when you have some experience working in defense you find out reality is more like: there's real criminal to catch, real victims to protect and to save, it's not like we have any time for non critical stuff such as going after pacific dissidents, and controlling all the medias like in V wou…
> However, when you have some experience working in defense you find out reality is more like: there's real criminal to catch, real victims to protect and to save, it's not like we have any time for non critical stuff such as going after pacific dissidents This is wildly self-serving. Security services all over the world absolutely go after dissidents and whistle-blower and many other undesirables. Just look at the C…
There's also the communist party, well I guess that's over now you're absolutely free to be communist, same goes for feminism.
And the groups in question have all won, their ideologies have won, you know have blacks, muslims, feminists, communists inside probably every government agency - even though, they will probably not be extremists, and love their country.
If these ideologies have won, and that freedom has stabilized for everyone, what's the point of going into yet another civil war now? If you agree it's pointless, then why are you afraid that the government would go after you if you are not dangerous?
You're saying the ethics of individual operators are irrelevant, does that mean you think that the ethic of Minutemen was irrelevant? It's half the story from my point of view, even you are criticizing their ethics ("trying to coerce into committing crimes").
Psychological warfare goes both ways you know, for a government to try to counter it seems pretty sane to me. It's not like you're not free nor have many means to publish all the agitation propaganda you want these days.
But we get it, you just want to keep your tech to overthrow elected governments instead helping the government to protect your family and people, because "solutions can create more problems than they solve": let's not do anything about our security problems and let's especially not try more tech nor tech upgrades.
The TV mini-series "Secret City" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4976512/ ) was courageous in its depiction of the growing surveillance state in Australia. (And it stars Anna Torv, from "Fringe", but with her native accent! ;-)
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I have mocked the anti-maskers and especially anti-vaxxers, but this crosses a line on the other end of the spectrum. I would only support an actual ban on mobility if it were to quarantine the virus in one place, like if the Chinese had locked down Wuhan before it managed to get out. That ship has sailed of course. It’s all over the damn place, so there is not much to be gained by travel bans.
The Chinese did lockdown Wuhan....internally. They prevented Chinese from moving in and out of Wuhan while letting the international flights continue.
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I think this is nicely said. I grew up in a Western European country where I was used to most people caring about big societal issues such as health, environment, civil rights and privacy. In most European countries there is real competition between newspapers and an, at least in some places, a tradition of democratic participation. Meanwhile, in Australia, the “free press” is effectively owned by Rupert Murdoch, the…
> the government needs to make voting for federal elections compulsory in order to get people to take a stance / have an opinion (yes, you will get a fine if you don’t vote!) This seems like such a bad idea. Ideally, the democratic process taps ‘the wisdom of crowds’ and allows a society to make reasonable decisions. But all human beings are not capable of contributing to good decision making. Roughly the 15% of peop…
Government should be for everyone. Parties should have a platform that is for a majority. For the most part, Australia has populist fairly centrist small c conservative governments.
It's getting bad at the moment here mostly because the current governing party is past due for it's turn on the opposition benches. And it also seems that everyone's having a go at being corrupt at the moment. Hopefully we get ontop of that.
Anyway, folk with low IQ's making bad choices isn't really a problem. We have optional preferential voting (rank choice), it's hard enough to make an informed decision above or below the line each time and I do research!
Most of the uniformed, just vote along family lines.
Anyway, everyone has a right to vote and a duty in some respect. Making it harder for some, by making it opt in, will lead to more problems then having disengaged voters participating in haphazard ways.
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…
My experience after having grown up in America, living in Germany 7 years, and then living almost a year in Australia, is that all those you write might be completely true, but even then, Australia is actually behind the United States in all the things you mentioned. Other than everything being redonk expensive, it's a Anglosphere paradise compared to the United States. The US is decades ahead of Australia in terms o…
Apparently North Korea is terrible compared to Australia. And yet the parent's comment was also not about North Korea and nor is the linked article. We could run the gamut on countries, there are another hundred plus after North Korea that are not great places to live compared to the affluent top.
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…
Australia is very neoliberal but so are many countries in Europe. Though there is a lot of difference between EU countries. The Nordic countries and Germany are a lot less like this.
But between Australia and the Netherlands there isn't actually that much difference when it comes to corporate interests running the country. PS I've lived in Australia a couple years too :)
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What was the justification in banning citizens from leaving?
At the most basic level: if people don’t leave, they can’t come back with the virus. Also, we’ve instituted mandatory hotel quarantine for anyone coming to Australia. But hotel quarantine only has a certain number of places; if less people leave Australia, then less people will come back and fill up hotel quarantine spaces.