Disaster South Australian citizens forced to use geoapp location to avoid wuhan wheezer.

The government of South Australia, one of the country’s six states, developed and is now testing an app as Orwellian as any in the free world to enforce its quarantine rules. People in South Australia will be forced to download an app that combines facial recognition and geolocation. The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” Premier Steven Marshall explained. “I think every South Australian should feel pretty proud that we are the national pilot for the home-based quarantine app.”

Other states also curtailed their citizens’ liberty in the name of safety. The state of Victoria announced a curfew and suspended its Parliament for key parts of the pandemic. “To put this in context, federal and state parliaments sat during both world wars and the Spanish Flu, and curfews have never been imposed,” the scholar John Lee observed in an article for the Brookings Institution. “In responding to a question about whether he had gone too far with respect to imposing a curfew (avoiding the question of why a curfew was needed when no other state had one), Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews replied: ‘it is not about human rights. It is about human life.’”

In New South Wales, Police Minister David Elliott defended the deployment of the Australian military to enforce lockdowns, telling the BBC that some residents of the state thought “the rules didn’t apply to them.” In Sydney, where more than 5 million people have been in lockdown for more than two months, and Melbourne, the country’s second-biggest city, anti-lockdown protests were banned, and when dissenters gathered anyway, hundreds were arrested and fined, Reuters reported.

Australia is undoubtedly a democracy, with multiple political parties, regular elections, and the peaceful transfer of power. But if a country indefinitely forbids its own citizens from leaving its borders, strands tens of thousands of its citizens abroad, puts strict rules on intrastate travel, prohibits citizens from leaving home without an excuse from an official government list, mandates masks even when people are outdoors and socially distanced, deploys the military to enforce those rules, bans protest, and arrests and fines dissenters, is that country still a liberal democracy?

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article link: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-australia-still-liberal-democracy/619940/

I don't usually post threads in this sub forum, but I didn't see this posted yet and it seemed like somethin' worth postin'. I thought it was amusing at least.

feel like this is a real "at what point is the cure worse than the disease?" type of shit, innit?

 

[Beautiful Border]

I wonder what COVID would do to a medieval population. Probably not a lot outside of the elderly, since they were all stick thin outside of the wealthy caste.

I guarantee they wouldn't have even noticed it. My theory is that since we've already eliminated or limited the harm of most of the world's truly dangerous diseases (polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, etc.) and multiple generations have grown up having never had to worry about diseases outside of the common cold and the flu, the moment 21st century humanity was faced with a new virus that was moderately dangerous everyone freaked the fuck out and overreacted. If our ancestors could see what we're doing today they'd be pissing themselves with laughter at how weak we are.

 

[Realistic Elephant]

The same question could be asked about the Spanish flu as well.

The Spanish flu response is similar to COVID overall but was much less severe. In various places there were bans on mass gatherings, mask mandates, and curfews. Churches and some other places were exempted from these restrictions but there were other measures such as requiring windows be kept open or improving ventilation (which is a very effective way of reducing exposure).

Other than that, businesses operated pretty much as usual.

Fun fact - there was an organization called the "Anti-Mask League of San Francisco" opposed to the mask mandates implemented in the city. Needless to say, the masks back then were as equally useless as the masks today.

 

[Realistic Elephant]

I guarantee they wouldn't have even noticed it. My theory is that since we've already eliminated or limited the harm of most of the world's truly dangerous diseases (polio, smallpox, tuberculosis, etc.) and multiple generations have grown up having never had to worry about diseases outside of the common cold and the flu, the moment 21st century humanity was faced with a new virus that was moderately dangerous everyone freaked the fuck out and overreacted. If our ancestors could see what we're doing today they'd be pissing themselves with laughter at how weak we are.

Oh, absolutely. No matter what way you look at it COVID is simply not that dangerous a disease....even for the oldest and most vulnerable the survival rate is 95% and the world's population has increased at a rate hardly different from prior years despite the pandemic.

It's impossible for anyone alive today in the developed world (and even much of the developing world) to comprehend how much death was a part of life in the centuries prior to modern medicine and sanitation.

For all of pre-industrial human history the life expectancy at birth was 25-35 years on average, depending on the era and conditions. This didn't mean people died at those ages but rather infant and child mortality was so high it reduced the expected lifespan significantly. It was not uncommon for parents to bury at least one or two children who didn't survive childhood, so death was always an unavoidable part of life.

On top of this there were also the ever-present dangers of war, disease and famines for those who did survive childhood. The Early/High Middle Ages in Europe were kind of a golden age when it comes to pre-industrial life expectancy but the prosperity of the time led to the Black Death.

 

[XANA]

Australia really do be descended from England - the only difference is that citizens will give up their rights totally instead of having some shred of it dominated by endless loicenses.

 

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I find all this very funny.

This is being done, as an option that lets people actually self-quarantine in a way that provides some public health assurance, because Australia refuses to pay to build sufficient quarantine facilities/prisons to hold carriers. If Australia wasn't run by Jews they'd just put them up in tents in an army base somewhere and guard them.

Australia has a big problem with filthy traitors from the 'Lebanese Forces' terrorist group that collaborated with the jews back home who refuse to not walk around giving grandmothers the coof.

They aren't being Orwellian. They're being cheap neoliberals.