Makes me really consider the information I was told about FM.

They seem to follow the same idea. Purportedly they are being passed to stop crime or at least aid the investigation of suspected criminals.

The other set of laws are purportedly meant to stop the spread of infectious disease.

But the laws are clearly not well balanced in terms of privacy rights and personal freedom.

There is also this ominous synchronization between government and trans-national bodies such as the WHO with major technology firms; having the latter act as uncritical propaganda arms of the former - no matter the evidence or reasons for doubt.

Rather than discussion and reasoning, there is this flow of labels thrown around at dissenters, regardless of who they are and what they say.

If they critique transwomen competing with women they are called transphobic and accused of hate speech.

If they prefer not to take a vaccine shot and/or critique lockdowns and restrictions; they are called anti-vaxxers and accused of spreading misinformation.

All of this points in the direction of tyranny and totalitarianism. All we can do is vote with our feet.

not looking good.

So "not allowed to leave for any reason" is hyperbole. It has a grain of truth but like the other things on your list is a gross exaggeration.

It's almost as if you shouldn't take everything you read online at face value

[1] https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/leaving-australia

Warranted, targeted surveillance is less bad than surveilling everyone to see if they are committing crimes, which less bad than recording what everyone did so they can be charged with crimes retroactively, which is less bad than charging people for crimes they're only predicted to commit.

Sure. Wire-tapping has been a thing almost as long as phones themselves. With a warrant, it is best that the police should be able to surveil your phone calls.

> Ring camera

With a warrant? Absolutely.

[4] https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

I agree and disagree with both of you. They're right that institutional power can and does get away with trampling the social contract, to the degree it feels it can. You're right that the contract itself is (supposedly) premised on mutual consent. But both of these strike me as defeatist postures. They both have in common the idea that the contract is with the state which holds all the power. What I think you both miss is that every state and every government is just made up of people. Whatever durability liberal democracy has, or the fact that it's emerged repeatedly over a couple millenia and shown itself capable of out-producing and out-warring autocracies, is not as much premised on a Hobbesian contract or a legal contract, or even the consent of the governed, so much as it is on the consent of those in government, their own sense of social status, and the degree to which that status results from their exclusion of the people they govern or their need for approval from those people. To the extent that all these incursions on privacy are still being done in the name of protecting children or stopping terrorism, as phony as that is, it gives the people in power a psychological pass for doing what would otherwise be Stasi or KGB style intrusion. It makes them acceptable at parties and makes them able to believe that they're "the good guys". The collapse of the USSR came about because the individuals tasked with oppressing the population - from Gorbachev down to the border guards - could no longer view themselves as the good guys if they did these things to their countrymen. The last stages of an oppressive society are where fear of punishment is no longer as bad as the need to escape oppression. For reasons that dovetail with the simplified explanations offered about what governments naturally do, etc, it's easy for a free society like Australia to slip into totalitarianism, and quite hard for it to get out. But all it really boils down to - and I mean, even down to the level of these universal observations we're all making in online comments, and up to the Congress or parliament or the inner circle of the CCP, is an individual dick measuring popularity contest. If the people in power are made to feel they are the bad guys, they'll overthrow the system. But that does require the revolution coming for its own. In this case, it will be no time at all before some MP gets entrapped by one of these things... the question on the table is really who is in charge there now and where does power flow from?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/apr/20/banki...

You want a wise, just dictator for life, and maybe you luck out and get one who reigns beneficently for a few decades, but who's to say their successor will be as good, or the next one, and on and on until you inevitably get a Stalin.

Put another way: if the leader dies, and heir A spends all their effort on ruling effectively, and heir B spends all their effort on beating heir A to the throne, how can heir A succeed? You'd need metrics for being a good ruler which are immune to Goodhart's Law.

Given that—over time—power inevitably centralizes and inevitably is abused, those tendencies must be counterbalanced; or else power must be regularly reset by more crude means.

It seems to me that Australia is lagging behind more than being an experiment, considering they're still talking about encryption laws etc. But perhaps the US is as well?

Every platform is likely to eventually reflect the most common forms of groupthink from the culture. The reason I love HN is that I regularly see counter points and good perspective here that I simply don’t see anywhere else.

Your next hurdle is getting a police / army force as police can take over your city if they are not faithful to you. Since you can't protect your island, you'll need some diplomatic deal with a bigger country (USA, France, China, etc...) to pledge for your protection. Gotta pay them somehow for that kind of protection.

Don't be deluded. There are no dictators out there, but representations of the current forces and powers. At some duration in the timeline of this earth, the powers and forces enabled the creation of democratic nations with generous freedoms afforded to its citizens. Of course this would change as these powers and forces shift.

Australia is a de-facto military dictatorship given that it is a resource-export-oriented nation. The forces at the time (being part of the Common Wealth and an ally to the US) has made it a democratic and free country.

Really really hard. You have only a few choices and they're all terrible. First one is revolution, see history for how that tends to go. Second is conquest and then colonization followed by eventual independence, again see history for how much this sucks for your stated aims. Seasteading might work but if you develop and build the stuff to make it work you're unlikely to get any acknowledgement of your statehood from any other nation but might get attacked by them [1]. The last option is outer space somewhere and self-sufficient space colonies are still science fiction and once they're not the early pioneers are going to die a lot and their living situation is going to be awful.

1: https://reason.com/2019/10/14/how-two-seasteaders-wound-up-m...

The government will ignore a lot of things for a pretty long time as long as you're building, doing stuff and paying taxes.

But an independent country? Maybe on a bunch of ships in international waters.

Otherwise you'll quickly find yourself with a small army at your "borders".

Too many people these days, soldiers, guns and ammunition are cheap and all land is taken.

I did not confuse anything. You may be confused about what I mean, and if so, I'm sorry for any unclear communication on my part that led to that state of affairs. Feel free to ask for clarification of my position if you're curious.

> Besides which, the state has done just fine without such invasive measures before.

That is not obviously true to me. For most of the period of time during which the people have had the capability to communicate remotely, the state has also had the capability to surveil that communication when warranted. And it seems plausible to me that the lack of that capability before permitted much criminality that since has been prevented.

That's what the founding fathers did, ironically. Didn't work either.

They do carry the same weight.

They are both useless.

Standing around holding signs and marching and chanting has never been effective.

Having the crowds filmed and broadcast, on the other hand, is effective. If the media isn’t making a story out of it, it means nothing.

In the 60s and 70s people began to believe marching and protesting en mass was effective. But, it was only effective because the media, for their own reasons and agendas, decided to broadcast the Freedom Marches and anti-war marches and all the rest.

I don’t believe that prior to the 60s, anyone would have considered milling around in front of govt buildings effective at all. To be sure, having mobs tearing down the buildings was effective and happened frequently.

You could assemble a million protestors in DC and, if it’s not shown in CNN, you might as well have stayed home.

But strong judiciary and executive (and strong borders between them) is a core understanding in every real democracy.

If the executive OR the judiciary can do everything (or are completely intermingled) you have no democracy but a "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ;)

Indeed. Revolution, rebellion. None of these *have* to be violent per se. The Pax French have handled massive changes in gov without armed conflict in the 20th Century (not counting WWII and Nazis occupation.) It will be very interesting to see how well their democracy will counter this.

But in the real world, unfortunately, you are absolutely correct. Even the idea that there are only a short list of things that a government can do is a foreign concept to most folks.

The fact that the majority has often historically been in the wrong doesn't mean that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and get rid of enforcement of the laws: Anarchy is not preferable to a well ordered peaceful society.

Okay, but if a government wasn’t legally allowed to surveil you, they could change the law tomorrow so that they could legally surveil you. I’m not sure what this mode of argument really shows.

The age of their regime has nothing to do with their history of practicing direct democracy, that happened well after the founding of the US.

> This kind of rhetoric tends to come from elitist thinkers that would want a guarantee of power over people because they think they are right and somehow destined to have it.

On the contrary, I'm just defending the wisdom of the existing constitutional republic framework that we have currently. There's obvious value in constitutional safeguards against the whims of the mob, while still giving the citizenry a say in the long-term direction of the state.

Stability of dictatorships is a "trains run on time" style Big Lie.

Privately (Runbox is my employer's provider) I run my own server and desktop notifications of new mail are often faster than the page loads where it was triggered. Maybe I'm spoiled.

https://kb.mailbox.org/display/MBOKBEN/Customizing+your+mail...

Just like Cuba and Eastern Europe when the USSR was still around. Wonder why.

Also protests have been heavily repressed during Macron, it's becoming scary to actually go sometimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill

Odd choice of topics to be outraged about.

How many times has this theory been cheated in the last thousand years?

the answer is, a lot

> ... oh and also the rest of the entire planet.

That wasn't what this thread was about but yes I am aware.

What is allowed here, is hacking for the police. That necessarily can include changing files on the target computers (e.g. deleting logs) - this is the way I read this. And I would see the point in it - if it really only get applied in serious crimes like terrorism to catch the whole network for example. (back to trust)

But yes, it maybe makes it more easy to tamper undetected with evidence in sneaky ways, but not if for example you would log the hacking activities by default of the police. In fact, I strongly believe that this should be done, but doubt, it will be.

Wow, that's Orwellian to say the least.

Freedom is never granted, it is earned.

So "Take the redpill" is (in this case) a statement about taking a different path with politics (politicians) .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE

I think he wrote that book in part because he was frustrated by the lack of nuance in his presentation and the fact that it sort of "went viral". 13 million views for a lecture about law is pretty astonishing.

Just out of curiosity - are you possibly confusing civil vs. criminal cases? The 5th amendment does apply in civil cases to the extent that you cannot be compelled to testify - but a judge can interpret your lack of response in a negative light in a civil setting. This differs from criminal cases where the lack of testimony is not admissible nor can it be considered in determination or sentencing.

I say this a little tongue in cheek, but it's a real problem I've yet to understand -- how can an outlier intelligent person thrive in a system that caters to the masses? The masses have an incentive to drain any marginal value out of the intelligent, and have the political power to do so.

Edit: @majormajor sorry HN wont let me reply. The reason would be because the bottom 51% have something to gain from extraction. The top 51% however are already superior and dont need to rely on extraction to fulfill their wants/needs.

51% might have been too broad a number, but do you get my drift? Those in the lower intelligence brackets have a lot to gain, but those in the upper intelligence brackets do not have a lot to gain

As an aside, if you look at the elected representatives of Australia, I suspect you'll find most of them are highly educated.

It's very non-obvious to me why there's a natural "coalition of the bottom" versus that just being one possible way for things to shake out.

(It's also worth noting that the original American system already suffered a MASSIVE failure of the state - coincidentally also around the hundred year mark - which makes me think maybe they didn't have things perfectly figured out anyway. It hurts the credibility of the appeal to tradition/authority.)