By Ryan McMaken
It is during "emergencies" when we learn who really holds political power, and how ineffective are constitutional measures designed to limit the regime's power.
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36 sats \ 29 replies \ @joda 6 Mar
"It was only after non-elite political opposition began to look uncontrollable that some state institutions began to relent. "
I think this is a good thing. It means resistance still works, and everyday people still hold the real power. Some progressive populations will respect authority and that's fine too.
The fact that the protestors weren't beaten, jailed, etc, means things are working okay. It's not perfect, but it is a dynamic balance.
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26 sats \ 7 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Australia and New Zealand arrested people who didn’t follow COVID protocols. Many were sent to internment camps.
Gun control enables government excess and abuse
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36 sats \ 6 replies \ @joda 6 Mar
I'm not for gun control, but if law enforcement comes after you, your guns don't do you any good. You can scare off a bureaucrat, but they can call a three letter agency to fuck you up.
I'll look up the internment camp stuff; that sounds horrific.
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26 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Law enforcement can’t target everyone.
Local police can’t stop a riot. You saw this in Minneapolis where rioters burned down a police station
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
I'm pretty sure they weren't trying to stop those riots. Whether they could have is an open question.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
That was a big part of my saying that we got off relatively lightly. It was especially ugly because of how many indigenous folks were rounded up into camps.
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1 sat \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Where do you get your news?
I am surprised you didn’t know about what happened in Australia 🇦🇺.
Do you believe your local politicians on most matters because they have your best interests at heart?
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @joda 7 Mar
I remember a bit about it from 3 years ago. I just spent a good while reading about it and it seems it was overblown at the time and was mostly just quarantine for travelers. But I wasn't there so don't want to assume too much.
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11 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
People were arrested for in person gatherings and not getting the spike protein.
We shouldn’t be surprised by this policy
In Australia voting is mandatory. You cannot choose to abstain.
Australia 🇦🇺 denied entry to Novak. He wasted his time flying there for the Australian open. The COVID regime wanted to embarrass a tennis celebrity publicly
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10 sats \ 20 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
I wouldn't go that far, but it certainly could be worse.
What the tyrannical Covid measures demonstrated is that we need a layer of protection that reacts quicker than the courts. It's insane that governors can institute whatever illegal decrees they feel like and we just have to wait for months or years and hope the courts eventually come to the right conclusions.
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27 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Remember 14 days to flatten the curve?
14 days became 14 months and longer
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26 sats \ 18 replies \ @joda 6 Mar
I guess I don't look back at it as "tyranny". Because the "enforcers" were just as confused as the rest of us, and I think local governments had everyone's best interests at heart, compliance was mostly self-governed. We were out doing all kinds of stuff during "lockdown" and no one gave us any shit.
It was really the businesses who had it hard. It was truly scary to think that your business could not operate for an indefinite length of time, AND people would DIE if they were in enclosed spaces together.
I think it's pretty extreme to think the US governments were acting like a Communist dictatorship. Mistakes were made, but millions of people died too. I'm glad people protested, but I also didn't feel like my civil liberties were being completely suppressed. I can easily imagine a MUCH worse scenario.
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27 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Best interests at heart?
Policy should not be based on matters of the heart.
Best intentions pave the road to hell.
Unelected bureaucrats are the most venal and power hungry people.
Local politicians ignored their constituents and abused their emergency powers.
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Commercial activity was restricted. Businesses were forced to close unless you received a wealthy donor exemption.
Regular people were forced to eat at home while governors ate at swanky restaurants like French laundry
Sounds like communist party behavior
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26 sats \ 6 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Compliance was self governed?
There were many people who opposed covid restrictions and mandates but complied nevertheless under threat of being fined or arrested or incarcerated.
Compliance does not mean voluntary support or agreement
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36 sats \ 5 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
This depends on where you were and what stage of the pandemic we're talking about. In much of Red America, there weren't government mandates immediately and they were lifted somewhat quickly. However, many people followed Covid guidance on their own accord.
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26 sats \ 4 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Not in my state and county where restrictions remained thru the beginning of 2022.
Vaccine passport to eat in restaurants or attend a large sporting event.
Mask mandates were lifted in 2022
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10 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
Yeah, you probably had it the worst. Maybe NY.
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26 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
California was bad especially SF and LA. It was probably fine in small rural areas.
San Diego was slightly better: no mask mandate in 2021.
All the kids had to wear masks when classroom instruction resumed. This was demanded by teachers. God forbid if a teacher gets sick. Students might actually learn!
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Most covid fatalities were senior citizens.
The average age was 80 years.
The lockdowns were overkill. The definition of essential businesses was arbitrary. If a virus is so deadly people don’t have to be reminded.
YouTube and Twitter suppressed dissent.
Vaccine and booster mandates were invasive. COVID jabs were not adequately tested for safety and efficacy.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
It depends where you were, but millions of Americans lost their jobs or their businesses because of non-scientific extrajudicial decrees. That is tyranny. Just because something could have been worse, doesn't mean it was acceptable.
I'm not using "tyranny" as a buzzword. The point is that many governors acted outside of their constitutional authority and there was no recourse for their victims. In a free society, our liberties are presumed and any infringements on them require due process. Whether or not they had our best interests at heart is completely irrelevant to whether the way they exercised power was tyrannical.
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
It was tyranny. And illegal and unconstitutional. And immoral
At least you didn’t use Nazi or Hitler. Those insults are reserved for conservatives
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0 sats \ 5 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
Plenty of people were inside together and didn’t die.
Maybe they got sick but they didn’t die.
Do you know anyone who died from covid? How old? Diabetic? Obese? Hypertension?
Many nursing home residents died from covid. Nursing home residents are also old and frail. Lots of sick seniors. Nursing home is your last home. No one moves to a townhouse from a nursing home.
Nursing home residents are on Medicaid which means they are poor.
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36 sats \ 4 replies \ @joda 7 Mar
Yes in our fields we experienced hundreds of COVID deaths, mostly old, though some children and some 50s-60s. Sometimes but not always with abnormal health conditions.
I also have some experience with assisted living. Assisted living is relatively expensive, depending on the area.
I don't believe vaccines should be mandated. Almost all of the people who we saw die from COVID were not vaccinated, but that doesn't at all make me think the government should make these decisions for people.
Some people will die who wouldn't have, had they been vaccinated. Maybe some vaccine will turn out to be lethal. It shouldn't give any obligation for a just government to restrict civil liberties.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
Assisted living facility is different from a nursing home?
Nursing home residents are on Medicaid and often run by the county or state
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
Do you get covid booster every 3 months?
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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @joda 7 Mar
God no, but I get vaccines sometimes when I'll be around vulnerable populations, which is only intermittently these days.
Similar for masking. I wear one around vulnerable people or when I'm in hospitals or elder care or hospice situations.
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26 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
This should have been covid policy: protect vulnerable people
By protecting everyone, vulnerable people received less protection
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36 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner 6 Mar
Power is tyrannical and takes advantage of the fragility of the moment to implement restrictive measures. This has always been the case and always will be. Another situation where this happened was after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers. I will not give my opinion on whether these measures were good or bad, but the truth is that many restrictive measures were implemented worldwide, not only in the United States of America.
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42 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
In many ways we got off pretty easy in the US. There were at least parts of the country where life more or less went on like normal after a short period of restrictions.
Of course you're right about how regimes always look to exploit crises to enhance their power. What's useful about some of these episodes is that we get a look at what they're trying to do and who's in on it.
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26 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
COVID was great for affluent white female leftists or AWFL.
Spend all day in your 4000 square feet mansion, waiting for Amazon and food deliveries , lounging by the pool, Tesla charging in the garage. Hop on zoom for work meetings if you do work.
We are doing this together! I am making sacrifices to save lives!
Nauseating display of narcissism and vanity
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10 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
Somehow, I have not come across "AWFL" before. Thanks for sharing that.
It wasn;t so bad for graduate students with newborns either. I didn't need to leave my house often anyway and we were already super protective about germ exposure.
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26 sats \ 1 reply \ @Bell_curve 6 Mar
You were finishing a dissertation and caring for a newborn ?
If you have a newborn, you get a pass, justifiably
Most graduate students don’t get a pass because they are ruining the country with bogus degrees and research
Physicists and some economists get a pass
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Mar
I'd say they're (we're?) ruining the country with bogus influence. The degrees wouldn't matter if people paid less attention to us, as they should.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @hasherstacker 7 Mar
https://m.stacker.news/19232
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
👏👏👏
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Kmt 6 Mar freebie
Money rules
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
The most obnoxious part of covid was celebrities showing off their mansions because they were sheltering in place
Also , people who wore a mask in their car while driving alone
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @Undisciplined OP 7 Mar
I found it more obnoxious that the elderly were forced to spend their last months isolated from loved ones in the name of protecting their health.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Bell_curve 7 Mar
That was unconscionable
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