Some kids get vaccinated to go to some schools. And none of that is comparable to this pandemic situation where we have politicians blatantly ignoring the science and taking bread off the table by firing people who don't comply, even if they have excellent antibodies from past covid infection.
"The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label."
Alarm bells should be going off. Take a look at Australia. Are they in chains? Are they the frog in the boiling pot? I think they are the frog in the boiling pot.
When do we raise the alarm? When would you raise the alarm? When is it no longer over the top?
They're going to force people who quarantine at home (rather than a government-mandated quarantine "hotel" with guards) to install and use an app. Facial recognition, GPS tracking in your own home. And it will randomly ping you, and if you don't respond within 15 minutes it'll send the police to your house to conduct an in-person quarantine check. Source:
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They can arbitrarily lock you in your apartment building for up to weeks, no one allowed to leave. Source:
You want this to happen in the USA too? Because that's where we are headed once we allow covid vaccine passports and mandates like in NYC to fester and spread. The slope is slippery. Time to nip it in the bud, and if being "over the top" is what it takes to get that done then so be it. Assuage my fears if you really believe there isn't a risk of tyranny. We just went through a presidency where people were regularly warning about totalitarian regimes emerging in the USA. So I think I'm a bit warranted in raising the alarm when I see it happening in other democracies around the world.
Every time there is a pandemic, governments take extraordinary measures that people complain about. Many of them quite a bit harsher than any of the things you've described. Because pandemics are serious things that disrupt our normal ultra-social lives.
Let me say this. All of your spamming has not convinced me of your position. So, if you really wanted to, then perhaps you should reconsider your approach.
The upvotes I am getting tell me all I need to know, even if you yourself are not convinced. Nothing will convince some people even if it's staring them in the face, because they are uncomfortable. And we have been taught to be too comfortable.
It's the frog in the pot. We have never had the capabilities for mass surveillance and complete control over who participates in society, to the extent that we do now because of technology. Stalin would be salivating if he was still alive right now.
The data is on my side. The pandemic, while very serious, has touched over 100 million Americans directly (in the form of past covid) and I would still bet that the majority of those people would recoil in horror at what's going on in Australia or move away from NYC's "papers please" model if they had a choice.
Paranoid alarmism, as far as I am concerned. The real threat to our freedoms right now are demagogues trying to undermine our democracies.
Look, I can't speak for Australia. I just know Midnight Oil, and they had plenty of beef with Australia's government.
But the US can hardly even keep track of who has been vaccinated and who hasn't, who has had covid and who has not, who has died from covid, who has not. We are not on the cusp of some covid surveillance state. And requiring vaccination, even among those who have had the disease, is a defensible policy, not least because the extent of immunity to the virus depends on a number of factors (like how sick you got, how old you are, how long it has been since).
In my experience, most arguments about slippery-slopes to hell are just wrong. Probably because the slopes aren't that slippery, or the slope is so shallow you don't really know which way is down, or because predicting the future is actually really really hard.
In Australia the authoritarians are manufacturing consent using the usual suspect pollsters. They claim most Australians support this tyranny by quoting bullshit polls. Beware as your polls are just as rigged.
I know a lot of Australians and absolutely none of them are against the lockdowns. Many of them think the government should have gone further. And these are people who absolutely hate the current government and want labor in charge again.
Retrospective averages are used by guys like Nate to memory hole the fact that all the big name polls had Biden ahead by 10 points.
It is only the big name polls that are quoted by the media during the actual campaign.
Yeah, he won by 5% not 10% points. But if you look at what happened, is that they were pretty accurate about Biden's percent, and underestimated Trump's (e.g. undecideds or shy voters broke for Trump). And again, if your margin of error is 3 points, then a 55-45 could be a 52-48, a 10 pt difference shrinks to a 4 pt difference.
In any case, even if the polls were systematically off, and they may have been, that doesn't justify calling them all propaganda, or bs. It isn't even evidence of it. Because, as it happens, polling people is effing hard.
The fact that ALL the 'major' polls were heavily biased towards Biden, and Clinton before him, is clear evidence of corruption.
They are not all bullshit.
In 2016 the LA Times/usc poll was honest and accurate, so it was shut down for the 2020 election.
No, it is not "clear evidence of corruption". Not even close. It's evidence of being wrong. And no, not all the major polls overly favored Biden. At this point, you're just making crap up.
Look, there clearly are some "bullshit polls", and there are partisan polls paid for by candidates which tend to be favorable to them, and there a good polls with consistent bias, a kind of "house" effect as a consequence of their sampling methodology, etc.
That's why Nate Silver does averages of polls, btw, and weights polls in the average by their accuracy in previous elections.
It wasn't retrospective. It was a prediction, available on the day of the election, and before. Basically, you are talking nonsense, rationalizing your priors.
Oh come on. Silver's polling averages, and his election predictions, were up a year before the election, and are still up for everyone to see. "Retrospective now" doesn't even make sense. Keeping up his model and his averages on the web isn't "memory holing" anything, it's being radically honest. You can still see his 2016 predictions too!
https://www.science.org/content/article/having-sars-cov-2-on...
"The natural immune protection that develops after a SARS-CoV-2 infection offers considerably more of a shield against the Delta variant of the pandemic coronavirus than two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to a large Israeli study that some scientists wish came with a “Don’t try this at home” label."
Alarm bells should be going off. Take a look at Australia. Are they in chains? Are they the frog in the boiling pot? I think they are the frog in the boiling pot.
When do we raise the alarm? When would you raise the alarm? When is it no longer over the top?
They're going to force people who quarantine at home (rather than a government-mandated quarantine "hotel" with guards) to install and use an app. Facial recognition, GPS tracking in your own home. And it will randomly ping you, and if you don't respond within 15 minutes it'll send the police to your house to conduct an in-person quarantine check. Source:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/pandemic-a...
They're arresting people for making Facebook posts against lockdowns. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54007824
Australia presumes to say how many people can visit your home. Source:
https://theconversation.com/vaccine-passports-are-coming-to-...
“NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian yesterday announced freedoms for fully vaccinated people once 70% of the state’s eligible population are double dosed. These include being able to go to hospitality venues, hairdressers and gyms, and have five people to your home.”
They can arbitrarily lock you in your apartment building for up to weeks, no one allowed to leave. Source:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-53316097
You want this to happen in the USA too? Because that's where we are headed once we allow covid vaccine passports and mandates like in NYC to fester and spread. The slope is slippery. Time to nip it in the bud, and if being "over the top" is what it takes to get that done then so be it. Assuage my fears if you really believe there isn't a risk of tyranny. We just went through a presidency where people were regularly warning about totalitarian regimes emerging in the USA. So I think I'm a bit warranted in raising the alarm when I see it happening in other democracies around the world.