32 ms·

Civil Liberties in Times of Crisis [pdf]

92 points by elsewhen 6y ago

roflc0ptic 6y ago
This is fairly off topic, but I noticed that the paper thanks Dynata. I got a call purporting to be from Dynata that was a "push poll", meaning they were basically using it to present really unflattering questions about a particular candidate. It had a pro right-wing, somewhat obliquely conspiratorial bent - "How concerned are you about child sex trafficking?" It also had more overt stuff, in the vein of "Given that Joe Biden's plans on the economy would destroy it, does that affect your preference for the two candidates?" I asked them who was funding the poll, and they said they didn't know. I find myself curious about how that world works, but cursory google searches didn't help, and I imagine it's pretty murky. Would love to know who is funding those sorts of polls.
- boredumb 6y ago
  "How concerned are you about child sex trafficking?" ...How is this an exclusive right wing concern? Wouldn't any notion of child sex trafficking by nature require a conspiracy or are we pretending this doesn't exist at alarming levels?
- part1of2 6y ago
  > This is fairly off topic, but I noticed that the paper thanks Dynata. I'm not sure about your anecdote, nor do I know who Dynata is, but you give the impression that this paper is only thanking one org. The entire section thanks a much broader base than you seem to portray: > We thank Dynata for assistance with data collection and incorporating civil liberties concerns into their surveys. We thank participants at Harvard Public Seminar, Harvard COVID Seminar, the Healthand Pandemics Seminar, London School of Economics, Princeton and NBER SI Development. Funding provided by Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Economics Department. The authors have no conflicts to disclose. The study is approved by IRB at Harvard University (IRB-20-0495 and IRB20-0467),and registered at AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0005609). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NOTE: Formatting issues from the PDF copy
  - roflc0ptic 6y ago
    I don't mean to give that impression at all. Looking through this paper it looks like quite legitimate, thoughtful research, and the fact that they used Dynata certainly doesn't impugn their motivations. As I was able to glean, Dynata is a polling firm. Their willingness to do push polling reflects badly on their ethics, but it's orthogonal to their ability to perform effective polling.
- thursday0987 6y ago
  how is being concerned about child sex trafficking pro right wing?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    It's not intrinsically, however linking to spurious allegations (like Pizzagate) seems to be a rightwing tactic. Actual substantial allegations (qv Maxwell/Epstein) seem to be less partisan.
  - AftHurrahWinch 6y ago
    You may be unaware that there is a predominantly Trump supporting movement called qanon which coopted an existing hashtag, #SaveTheChildren to allege that the cause of child sex trafficking is "Satan-worshiping, child-molesting criminals led by prominent Democrats". https://archive.is/HSKiG#selection-549.281-549.352 https://archive.is/HSKiG#selection-549.281-549.352 Now, some portion of attempts to #SaveTheChildren on social media are people concerned with child sex trafficking, and some portion are people who think that their political opponents are literal monsters... and it is often not immediately clear which is which.
    - thursday0987 6y ago
      ah. i'm not in either of those political bubbles and i'm not on twitter. guess i'm not missing out if being against child trafficking is somehow either a) a conspiracy theory on the left or b) a conspiracy theory on the right. child trafficking is wrong. full stop.
      - roflc0ptic 6y ago
        You don't really have to be in those bubbles to know about it - there was a much publicized shooting in a pizza shop circa 2017, motivated by baseless fears about a pedophile ring - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente... Full stop, child trafficking is wrong. But then, so is baselessly accusing people of something as heinous as child trafficking.
umvi 6y ago
> Fourth, we document a gradual but continuous decrease in respondents’ overall willingness to sacrifice rights and freedom, throughout March to mid-June of 2020 ... Such declines are accompanied by a decrease in expressed worries on health and economic conditions I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes. If, instead of covid, it were a plague with 50% death rate... I doubt people would be having as much "lockdown fatigue" since they would literally see the bodies piling up in their communities. Instead you have a disease that only mildly affects the majority, putting only small minorities in real danger, which doesn't jive with the "sky is falling" stories the media/government peddles. One parallel to this finding would be climate change, of course. There's a danger in preaching that the sky is falling in that if people can't see the sky falling with their own eyes, they are going to get "climate fatigue" followed by "a decrease in expressed worries on [climate] conditions".
- leetcrew 6y ago
  > I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes. when in doubt, "humans don't intuitively understand exponential growth" is often a good guess. to the average person, "barely under control" and "everything is fine" look very similar and the precautions taken in the former seem pretty silly. by the time an outbreak is directly observable in your day-to-day life, things have already gone sideways.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Your parent comment was talking about how mild the virus is for most people who get it, not about how many cases there are. So I don’t think the growth rate is relevant.
    - nobody9999 6y ago
      >Your parent comment was talking about how mild the virus is for most people who get it, not about how many cases there are. So I don’t think the growth rate is relevant. An interesting point. However, I'd posit that the growth rate is of paramount importance -- not because many will have mild symptoms, but because a small portion of those who contract COVID-19 will die or have serious long-term effects. As the number of cases grow, the number of folks who die/suffer serious long-term effects will grow along with them.
ceilingcorner 6y ago
The extreme politicization of the ACLU over the last 4 years has really been a big loss for civil liberties. They used to be the ones defending the civil rights of everyone, no matter how heinous the defendant or extreme the situation. These days they seem to just repeat hyper-partisan viewpoints ad infintum. Does a nonpartisan, alternative organization exist?
- whatshisface 6y ago
  I wonder whether the problem is with finding nonpartisan donors, or nonpartisan charity leaders, of if there's plenty of both but partisan forces work subversively.
- goatcode 6y ago
  > Does a nonpartisan, alternative organization exist? If it does, it soon won't. The only permanent home of Liberty is in the individual and families. Organizations become attractive to power-hungry psychopaths when they become effective, and those who gravitate to leadership are skewed toward self-serving. Therefore, compromise and decay are right on the heels of success. Faith in a man-made establishment is a slow escalator to a shallow grave.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    > The only permanent home of Liberty is in the individual and families. I agree. It has been unfortunate to see the attacks on individuality when it's the best way to view each other. Group identity has a long history of being evil and rationalizing inhuman or even dehumanizing treatment of out-groups. Liberty being associated with the individual, not a collective, is the peaceful path I believe. The grand irony of concepts like intersectionality is that when you slice a person enough ways, you end up with an individual. But that leap just hasn't been made it seems and I assume because there is power to be gained by forming and controlling a collective through the seduction of victimhood and grievance.
- brennanpeterson 6y ago
  This has been said for the history of the ACLU. And there are difficult balances there: do you defend the Nazi March? What if that March includes armed marchers aiming guns at others? Is aiming a gun speech? Or speech the ACLU has interest in defending? Does it maximize the freedom for marchers, counter marchers, or citizens? The ACLU had to come to terms with consequences, and harder answers. After defending and enabling a march where people died, the ACLU had to answer whether it was responsible...and it was. So the organization is a bit different, but I am not so sure that the ACLU could have continued. It had avoided really hard problems, and then had to come to terms with it. I prefer it this way: it is messy and tricky and also much less likely to be a disaster.
tboyd47 6y ago
It would have been interesting to see where the citizens of Turkey stand on this as well. Back in 2009, they did a study of each country's views on government regulation, and Turkey was the only country in the world where the majority of the people were against increased state regulation; every other nation was in favor of larger government.
Threeve303 6y ago
The problem with the lockdown is that we cannot know what would’ve happened without it. Now was it too extreme, for too long? Probably. Again we can’t know the counter factual. I really take issue with the ones complaining about a mask. It’s not curtailing your civil liberties. It’s a matter of etiquette and empathy. If empathy is not enough, then think about it this way... You can be required to wear a mask just like you’re required to wear other clothing. You do not have the freedom to walk around naked, for example.
- mberning 6y ago
  We can look at countries and states in the US that did bot have lockdowns and mask mandates.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Yes, and? Would you actually tell us what your point is, rather than making us guess?
- jandrewrogers 6y ago
  > You can be required to wear a mask just like you’re required to wear other clothing. You do not have the freedom to walk around naked, for example. This depends on where you live. In Seattle, for example, the freedom to walk around naked in public is explicitly recognized as a 1st Amendment right, both in theory and in practice. The question of if the government could force you to wear a specific article of clothing in public places was decided by the courts in the negative many decades ago, and people take advantage of this recognized Constitutional right to wear nothing at all.
  - siltpotato 6y ago
    You just made me want to burn every book by Rand and Locke in a glorious flame.
mindslight 6y ago
The civil liberties vs pandemic narrative strikes me as more of a political red herring rather than some real trade off being made, at least in the US. I skimmed the paper to see what specific liberties they were talking about. My answer to most of their posed questions is basically wu. > I am willing to relax privacy protections and let the government access my personal data during a crisis like the current one, in order to allow the government to make timely and accurate decisions. A moot point in the US, as there are few privacy protections to begin with. I can hardly see a contact tracing app becoming mandatory here. And while I'm generally concerned about Surveillance Valley's ever-growing control, I'm not specifically concerned if the results of its surveillance are used to inform a public health crisis. > I am willing to suspend democratic procedures and give the President [or Prime Minister] more power during a crisis like the current one, in order to ensure swift government actions. This is laughable as there has been very little federal government action in the US. But answering in the context of state governors, I still don't see how the democratic procedures have or will have been suspended. The executive has the power to execute, the legislature and the People are slower acting but at this point have had plenty of time to countermand. The closest example of this dynamic seems to be Wisconsin, where the courts took away powers from the governor, which is just the system working as intended. > I am willing to support the government controlling the media during a crisis like the current one, in order to ensure effective and uniform communication between the government and citizens. Also laughable given that much disinformation has come from the government itself. Authoritative government sources don't need the control of the media to get heard. Probably the closest we can on this topic is to flip it around to censorship of private party disinformation. But flipping around would have totally changed the responses. > I am willing to tolerate public health risks in order to participate in elections and other civic duties, even during a crisis like the current one. Once again nobody is talking about suspending any elections. What other civic duties are there? Jury duty comes to mind, but once again that's flipped - the practical question would be whether the state should force people to expose themselves to the pandemic in order to run its courts. Protests haven't been suspended, although there have been calls to when it's conveniently the other team doing the protesting. > I am willing to endure substantial economic losses during a crisis like the current one,in order to maintain the health and well-being of society as a whole. This strikes me as the closest to what people mean when they say "civil liberties", and it is indeed a point of debate that has been argued to bits. Horribly dishonestly from all sides, IMO. And I feel this paper itself will be part of that, used to overstate the economic argument as one about general civil liberties, even though it references few other liberties. The sad truth about civil liberties is that most people do not actually exercise their civil liberties most of the time.
mcguire 6y ago
Can someone parse this statement from the abstract for me? "Second, consistent across countries, exposure to health risks is associated with citizens’ greater willingness to trade off civil liberties, though individuals who are more economically disadvantaged are less willing to do so."
- josephcsible 6y ago
  Higher-risk people are more likely to be pro-lockdown. Poorer people are more likely to be pro-reopen.

92 points by elsewhen 6y ago

This is fairly off topic, but I noticed that the paper thanks Dynata. I got a call purporting to be from Dynata that was a "push poll", meaning they were basically using it to present really unflattering questions about a particular candidate. It had a pro right-wing, somewhat obliquely conspiratorial bent - "How concerned are you about child sex trafficking?" It also had more overt stuff, in the vein of "Given that Joe Biden's plans on the economy would destroy it, does that affect your preference for the two candidates?" I asked them who was funding the poll, and they said they didn't know. I find myself curious about how that world works, but cursory google searches didn't help, and I imagine it's pretty murky. Would love to know who is funding those sorts of polls.

boredumb 6y ago
"How concerned are you about child sex trafficking?" ...How is this an exclusive right wing concern? Wouldn't any notion of child sex trafficking by nature require a conspiracy or are we pretending this doesn't exist at alarming levels?
part1of2 6y ago
> This is fairly off topic, but I noticed that the paper thanks Dynata. I'm not sure about your anecdote, nor do I know who Dynata is, but you give the impression that this paper is only thanking one org. The entire section thanks a much broader base than you seem to portray: > We thank Dynata for assistance with data collection and incorporating civil liberties concerns into their surveys. We thank participants at Harvard Public Seminar, Harvard COVID Seminar, the Healthand Pandemics Seminar, London School of Economics, Princeton and NBER SI Development. Funding provided by Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Economics Department. The authors have no conflicts to disclose. The study is approved by IRB at Harvard University (IRB-20-0495 and IRB20-0467),and registered at AEA-RCT registry (AEARCTR-0005609). The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NOTE: Formatting issues from the PDF copy
- roflc0ptic 6y ago
  I don't mean to give that impression at all. Looking through this paper it looks like quite legitimate, thoughtful research, and the fact that they used Dynata certainly doesn't impugn their motivations. As I was able to glean, Dynata is a polling firm. Their willingness to do push polling reflects badly on their ethics, but it's orthogonal to their ability to perform effective polling.
thursday0987 6y ago
how is being concerned about child sex trafficking pro right wing?
- pjc50 6y ago
  It's not intrinsically, however linking to spurious allegations (like Pizzagate) seems to be a rightwing tactic. Actual substantial allegations (qv Maxwell/Epstein) seem to be less partisan.
- AftHurrahWinch 6y ago
  You may be unaware that there is a predominantly Trump supporting movement called qanon which coopted an existing hashtag, #SaveTheChildren to allege that the cause of child sex trafficking is "Satan-worshiping, child-molesting criminals led by prominent Democrats". https://archive.is/HSKiG#selection-549.281-549.352 https://archive.is/HSKiG#selection-549.281-549.352 Now, some portion of attempts to #SaveTheChildren on social media are people concerned with child sex trafficking, and some portion are people who think that their political opponents are literal monsters... and it is often not immediately clear which is which.
  - thursday0987 6y ago
    ah. i'm not in either of those political bubbles and i'm not on twitter. guess i'm not missing out if being against child trafficking is somehow either a) a conspiracy theory on the left or b) a conspiracy theory on the right. child trafficking is wrong. full stop.
    - roflc0ptic 6y ago
      You don't really have to be in those bubbles to know about it - there was a much publicized shooting in a pizza shop circa 2017, motivated by baseless fears about a pedophile ring - https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sentence.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/22/us/pizzagate-attack-sente... Full stop, child trafficking is wrong. But then, so is baselessly accusing people of something as heinous as child trafficking.

umvi 6y ago

> Fourth, we document a gradual but continuous decrease in respondents’ overall willingness to sacrifice rights and freedom, throughout March to mid-June of 2020 ... Such declines are accompanied by a decrease in expressed worries on health and economic conditions I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes. If, instead of covid, it were a plague with 50% death rate... I doubt people would be having as much "lockdown fatigue" since they would literally see the bodies piling up in their communities. Instead you have a disease that only mildly affects the majority, putting only small minorities in real danger, which doesn't jive with the "sky is falling" stories the media/government peddles. One parallel to this finding would be climate change, of course. There's a danger in preaching that the sky is falling in that if people can't see the sky falling with their own eyes, they are going to get "climate fatigue" followed by "a decrease in expressed worries on [climate] conditions".

leetcrew 6y ago
> I wonder if this is simply because there is a mismatch between what people are being told and what people are observing with their own eyes. when in doubt, "humans don't intuitively understand exponential growth" is often a good guess. to the average person, "barely under control" and "everything is fine" look very similar and the precautions taken in the former seem pretty silly. by the time an outbreak is directly observable in your day-to-day life, things have already gone sideways.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Your parent comment was talking about how mild the virus is for most people who get it, not about how many cases there are. So I don’t think the growth rate is relevant.
  - nobody9999 6y ago
    >Your parent comment was talking about how mild the virus is for most people who get it, not about how many cases there are. So I don’t think the growth rate is relevant. An interesting point. However, I'd posit that the growth rate is of paramount importance -- not because many will have mild symptoms, but because a small portion of those who contract COVID-19 will die or have serious long-term effects. As the number of cases grow, the number of folks who die/suffer serious long-term effects will grow along with them.

ceilingcorner 6y ago

The extreme politicization of the ACLU over the last 4 years has really been a big loss for civil liberties. They used to be the ones defending the civil rights of everyone, no matter how heinous the defendant or extreme the situation. These days they seem to just repeat hyper-partisan viewpoints ad infintum. Does a nonpartisan, alternative organization exist?

whatshisface 6y ago
I wonder whether the problem is with finding nonpartisan donors, or nonpartisan charity leaders, of if there's plenty of both but partisan forces work subversively.
goatcode 6y ago
> Does a nonpartisan, alternative organization exist? If it does, it soon won't. The only permanent home of Liberty is in the individual and families. Organizations become attractive to power-hungry psychopaths when they become effective, and those who gravitate to leadership are skewed toward self-serving. Therefore, compromise and decay are right on the heels of success. Faith in a man-made establishment is a slow escalator to a shallow grave.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  > The only permanent home of Liberty is in the individual and families. I agree. It has been unfortunate to see the attacks on individuality when it's the best way to view each other. Group identity has a long history of being evil and rationalizing inhuman or even dehumanizing treatment of out-groups. Liberty being associated with the individual, not a collective, is the peaceful path I believe. The grand irony of concepts like intersectionality is that when you slice a person enough ways, you end up with an individual. But that leap just hasn't been made it seems and I assume because there is power to be gained by forming and controlling a collective through the seduction of victimhood and grievance.
brennanpeterson 6y ago
This has been said for the history of the ACLU. And there are difficult balances there: do you defend the Nazi March? What if that March includes armed marchers aiming guns at others? Is aiming a gun speech? Or speech the ACLU has interest in defending? Does it maximize the freedom for marchers, counter marchers, or citizens? The ACLU had to come to terms with consequences, and harder answers. After defending and enabling a march where people died, the ACLU had to answer whether it was responsible...and it was. So the organization is a bit different, but I am not so sure that the ACLU could have continued. It had avoided really hard problems, and then had to come to terms with it. I prefer it this way: it is messy and tricky and also much less likely to be a disaster.

tboyd47 6y ago

It would have been interesting to see where the citizens of Turkey stand on this as well. Back in 2009, they did a study of each country's views on government regulation, and Turkey was the only country in the world where the majority of the people were against increased state regulation; every other nation was in favor of larger government.

Threeve303 6y ago

The problem with the lockdown is that we cannot know what would’ve happened without it. Now was it too extreme, for too long? Probably. Again we can’t know the counter factual. I really take issue with the ones complaining about a mask. It’s not curtailing your civil liberties. It’s a matter of etiquette and empathy. If empathy is not enough, then think about it this way... You can be required to wear a mask just like you’re required to wear other clothing. You do not have the freedom to walk around naked, for example.

mberning 6y ago
We can look at countries and states in the US that did bot have lockdowns and mask mandates.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Yes, and? Would you actually tell us what your point is, rather than making us guess?
jandrewrogers 6y ago
> You can be required to wear a mask just like you’re required to wear other clothing. You do not have the freedom to walk around naked, for example. This depends on where you live. In Seattle, for example, the freedom to walk around naked in public is explicitly recognized as a 1st Amendment right, both in theory and in practice. The question of if the government could force you to wear a specific article of clothing in public places was decided by the courts in the negative many decades ago, and people take advantage of this recognized Constitutional right to wear nothing at all.
- siltpotato 6y ago
  You just made me want to burn every book by Rand and Locke in a glorious flame.

mindslight 6y ago

The civil liberties vs pandemic narrative strikes me as more of a political red herring rather than some real trade off being made, at least in the US. I skimmed the paper to see what specific liberties they were talking about. My answer to most of their posed questions is basically wu. > I am willing to relax privacy protections and let the government access my personal data during a crisis like the current one, in order to allow the government to make timely and accurate decisions. A moot point in the US, as there are few privacy protections to begin with. I can hardly see a contact tracing app becoming mandatory here. And while I'm generally concerned about Surveillance Valley's ever-growing control, I'm not specifically concerned if the results of its surveillance are used to inform a public health crisis. > I am willing to suspend democratic procedures and give the President [or Prime Minister] more power during a crisis like the current one, in order to ensure swift government actions. This is laughable as there has been very little federal government action in the US. But answering in the context of state governors, I still don't see how the democratic procedures have or will have been suspended. The executive has the power to execute, the legislature and the People are slower acting but at this point have had plenty of time to countermand. The closest example of this dynamic seems to be Wisconsin, where the courts took away powers from the governor, which is just the system working as intended. > I am willing to support the government controlling the media during a crisis like the current one, in order to ensure effective and uniform communication between the government and citizens. Also laughable given that much disinformation has come from the government itself. Authoritative government sources don't need the control of the media to get heard. Probably the closest we can on this topic is to flip it around to censorship of private party disinformation. But flipping around would have totally changed the responses. > I am willing to tolerate public health risks in order to participate in elections and other civic duties, even during a crisis like the current one. Once again nobody is talking about suspending any elections. What other civic duties are there? Jury duty comes to mind, but once again that's flipped - the practical question would be whether the state should force people to expose themselves to the pandemic in order to run its courts. Protests haven't been suspended, although there have been calls to when it's conveniently the other team doing the protesting. > I am willing to endure substantial economic losses during a crisis like the current one,in order to maintain the health and well-being of society as a whole. This strikes me as the closest to what people mean when they say "civil liberties", and it is indeed a point of debate that has been argued to bits. Horribly dishonestly from all sides, IMO. And I feel this paper itself will be part of that, used to overstate the economic argument as one about general civil liberties, even though it references few other liberties. The sad truth about civil liberties is that most people do not actually exercise their civil liberties most of the time.

mcguire 6y ago

Can someone parse this statement from the abstract for me? "Second, consistent across countries, exposure to health risks is associated with citizens’ greater willingness to trade off civil liberties, though individuals who are more economically disadvantaged are less willing to do so."

josephcsible 6y ago
Higher-risk people are more likely to be pro-lockdown. Poorer people are more likely to be pro-reopen.