What use is there to build systems of control that will turn into more surveillance and eventual enslavement?
After the seatbelt laws came in, I didn't wear my seat belt. Before I new it, I was arrested. They sent me to a prison work camp. I had to work 14 hours a day. I nearly died of starvation. (The food was crap, I couldn't keep it down.) Fortunately, a guard took pity on me, and I managed to escape. I'm safe now, with a new ID, good internet access, etc, which is how I'm able to share my story.
If only we hadn't put up with those darn seatbelt laws, maybe things wouldn't have turned out so badly.
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
Do you really want similar systems built everywhere? Do you really want to have to show a covid vaccine passport to go to the theater or the gym or the bar? What about those 100+ million Americans who have antibodies from past covid infection already?
Do you believe that there is a point at which we should raise the alarm about impending tyranny? Do you believe that there was ever a point in the last 4 years where we had a President who may have had ties to supremacist movements? Do you believe that there was ever in the last 4 years a legitimate risk of tyranny taking over the land when he was in office? When would you personally depart from your cute but ineffectual seatbelt example and take a good hard long objective look at the system being built? I don't trust these people. They want power and control.
We know the shots don’t prevent spread, nor prevent you from getting it, the only argument is it lessens severity of symptoms, yet many are dying after the shots anyways and being hospitalized.
So you are basically arguing they I need to take a medicine that supposedly reduces symptoms, although in practice it isn’t showing that effect, but carries other potential negative health effects unique to the shot itself.
A more analogous car argument is that I would be required by law to pick up random hitch hikers everyday and drive them to their destination as a condition of owning and driving a vehicle, especially if we are working off the public good argument. If I refuse, I lose the car. Most likely 98% of those hitch hikers won’t chop me up into little pieces in the middle of the desert, but there is always that one...
That's just not true. The shots significantly decrease the chance that you'll get COVID. They also significantly decrease the chance that you'll spread COVID. This is most clear via the lower likelihood of infection. (You can't spread it if you don't have it.)
Sure, the shots are not 100% effective. They were never claimed to be. That doesn't mean they are not very effective. They are.
Vaccines dramatically reduce the incidence and severity of disease, and therefore the spread. It would be nice if I could say ‘prevent’ instead of ‘reduce’ there, but this is the vaccine we have for the pandemic we’re facing. Vaccine complications are about 1e-5, COVID complications (conditional on infection) are like 1e-2. Excepting non-falsifiable mRNA concerns the balance seems firmly in favor of vaccines if we’re all going to be exposed eventually.
It’s fair to argue that individuals should be able to chose to forgo that benefit based on their own views; it’s not fair to argue that there’s no benefit.
Kids get vaccinated to go to schools. We aren't in chains.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those who own polling companies use them as a tool of influence and propaganda, nothing more.
538's polling averages on election day put Biden at 51.8% of the vote and Trump at 43.4%. The margins of error were roughly 3 points either way.
Biden received 51.3% of the popular vote and Trump 46.9%.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
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.
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.
Just don't try to move too much and you won't even feel 'em.