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This is a knife that cuts through political issues. If your society has become so political that it can't even imagine the thought of restricting travel to prev

by jerf 7y ago

This is a knife that cuts through political issues. If your society has become so political that it can't even imagine the thought of restricting travel to prevent global pandemic, well, if nothing else consider that after the pandemic rages through a country it is fairly likely that said country's survivors are going to take a very dim view of open borders for a long time. If nothing else, consider that this is the sort of thing that will destroy any willingness to have free travel in the world. Similarly, no matter how free a country may be, there are rules about quarantines. You can be involuntarily subjected to one, and that's that. Your Constitutional rights or whatever your country may have are gone for the duration. This goes below politics and below the blustery winds of the day all the way down to one of the foundational principles of society, which is, you won't have a forum to argue about how open borders should be in your society if you don't have a society at all because it got sick and died. Despite superficial similarities, this isn't about immigration debates or open borders or xenophobia or any of those hot-button issues. This is just, can you take basic, "lizard-hindbrain of society" actions to protect yourself or not? I don't know that this particular outbreak is there or not, but it's only a matter of time before some outbreak of something is. So the answer is, everyone should prevent people from potentially affected areas from coming in to the country for the duration of the outbreak. If you fail at this task, no amount of rhetoric, no amount of voting, and no amount of mocking your political opponents with various epithets about how phobic they are will do so much as save a single life from the resulting outbreak, because those are all category errors. Epidemics are not political matters. They are way further down the societal Maslow hierarchy than that.

landryraccoon 7y ago
> Epidemics are not political matters. Why then are you entirely focused on a political solution to a non-political matter? Closing borders is a political solution. I disagree because your situation disrespects the progress that technical solutions have made over thousands of years of human progress. As medicine, hygiene and diagnostic tests improve, the probability of the dramatic epidemic event you propose falls closer to zero. We detect and quarantine individuals who are at high risk of being infected, without shutting down borders worldwide. We use better hygiene and sanitation to reduce the transmission of disease. We can educate the public when a disease is a risk and people can take measures to reduce the likelihood of transmission. Researchers can find cures and effective treatments to reduce the threat even if the disease spreads. For all your talk of reality and rationality, you don't mention any actual technical solutions in your grandstanding that this isn't about politics, instead contradicting yourself by basically focusing on a single political solution.
- jerf 7y ago
  The solutions you refer to don't exist, or can not be meaningfully deployed. I cite as evidence the article itself. Ebola isn't even all that contagious, really, and if those solutions were the solution to the problem, this article wouldn't have had to be written. Not everywhere is a first-world country. Most places aren't first-world country. Heck, even in the first world countries not everywhere is necessary "first-world country" status. Secondly, as I sort of alluded to in my mention of quarantine, it's not about "borders". National borders are a relatively convenient cutting point in our world, but anything can be quarantined; a house, a state, Manhattan, a particular valley, a cross-country region, an airport, a hospital, whatever it takes. It's not about politics. It's not about any of the characteristics of the people on either side of the quarantine boundary beyond "are they contagious or not". It's about whether you can take the necessary steps to stop the spread of a pandemic or not. I'll say it again, if you're sitting there standing on your rights and technology when something comes tearing through, then if nothing else you're going to filter out of the population all the people who are willing to trust technology and insist on free travel regardless, both because of changing attitudes and because of who ends up trusting in the assurances that everything's fine and doesn't take adequate steps themselves. If you value the believe in free travel, and you want a society to have an effective belief in free travel, then you must paradoxically be willing to handle cases like this very carefully, because if you stand on a 100% dogmatic "I don't care what diseases they have, free travel is literally more important than everyone's lives" stance you will create a society that does not value free travel at all once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through.
  - landryraccoon 7y ago
    > The solutions you refer to don't exist, or can not be meaningfully deployed. I cite as evidence the article itself. Ebola isn't even all that contagious, really, and if those solutions were the solution to the problem, this article wouldn't have had to be written. Did we read the same article? This article is about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation which does not have closed borders with the rest of the world, and Ebola has not spread beyond it's borders. The DRC does not have adequate medical infrastructure, sanitation or education and therefore the outbreak is occurring there. Europe and the United States do have effective technology, medicine and disease control, so there is almost no risk of a widespread Ebola outbreak here. > once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through. Until you present a pathogen with this quality that cannot be controlled in the western world this is science fiction. You might as well argue that xenophobia and authoritarianism will prevail once sentient androids revolt. Until you have evidence the threat actually exists you're arguing based on ideology.

by jerf 7y ago

landryraccoon 7y ago

> Epidemics are not political matters. Why then are you entirely focused on a political solution to a non-political matter? Closing borders is a political solution. I disagree because your situation disrespects the progress that technical solutions have made over thousands of years of human progress. As medicine, hygiene and diagnostic tests improve, the probability of the dramatic epidemic event you propose falls closer to zero. We detect and quarantine individuals who are at high risk of being infected, without shutting down borders worldwide. We use better hygiene and sanitation to reduce the transmission of disease. We can educate the public when a disease is a risk and people can take measures to reduce the likelihood of transmission. Researchers can find cures and effective treatments to reduce the threat even if the disease spreads. For all your talk of reality and rationality, you don't mention any actual technical solutions in your grandstanding that this isn't about politics, instead contradicting yourself by basically focusing on a single political solution.

jerf 7y ago
The solutions you refer to don't exist, or can not be meaningfully deployed. I cite as evidence the article itself. Ebola isn't even all that contagious, really, and if those solutions were the solution to the problem, this article wouldn't have had to be written. Not everywhere is a first-world country. Most places aren't first-world country. Heck, even in the first world countries not everywhere is necessary "first-world country" status. Secondly, as I sort of alluded to in my mention of quarantine, it's not about "borders". National borders are a relatively convenient cutting point in our world, but anything can be quarantined; a house, a state, Manhattan, a particular valley, a cross-country region, an airport, a hospital, whatever it takes. It's not about politics. It's not about any of the characteristics of the people on either side of the quarantine boundary beyond "are they contagious or not". It's about whether you can take the necessary steps to stop the spread of a pandemic or not. I'll say it again, if you're sitting there standing on your rights and technology when something comes tearing through, then if nothing else you're going to filter out of the population all the people who are willing to trust technology and insist on free travel regardless, both because of changing attitudes and because of who ends up trusting in the assurances that everything's fine and doesn't take adequate steps themselves. If you value the believe in free travel, and you want a society to have an effective belief in free travel, then you must paradoxically be willing to handle cases like this very carefully, because if you stand on a 100% dogmatic "I don't care what diseases they have, free travel is literally more important than everyone's lives" stance you will create a society that does not value free travel at all once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through.
- landryraccoon 7y ago
  > The solutions you refer to don't exist, or can not be meaningfully deployed. I cite as evidence the article itself. Ebola isn't even all that contagious, really, and if those solutions were the solution to the problem, this article wouldn't have had to be written. Did we read the same article? This article is about the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a nation which does not have closed borders with the rest of the world, and Ebola has not spread beyond it's borders. The DRC does not have adequate medical infrastructure, sanitation or education and therefore the outbreak is occurring there. Europe and the United States do have effective technology, medicine and disease control, so there is almost no risk of a widespread Ebola outbreak here. > once a highly-preventable epidemic sweeps through. Until you present a pathogen with this quality that cannot be controlled in the western world this is science fiction. You might as well argue that xenophobia and authoritarianism will prevail once sentient androids revolt. Until you have evidence the threat actually exists you're arguing based on ideology.