At least some Australians are actively resisting the thugs who govern that once-free country. (DBx: Note that Victoria’s premier, Dan Andrews, declared that Friday’s 61 new cases [cases, not deaths] of Covid in that state – a state with a population of 6.7 million – portends “catastrophe.” On Friday, the seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases was a whopping 39. Sixty-one is 0.00091 percent of Victoria’s population; 39 is 0.00058 percent. [There’s been no Covid death in Victoria since October 27th, when two people died.] When government gets to define such a situation as a “catastrophe” in the making, and then to use this ‘evidence’ of a coming “catastrophe” as an excuse to unleash unprecedented restrictions on freedom, restrictions enforced with unprecedented powers, tyranny has truly arrived. Meanwhile in Sweden, the seven-day average of Covid deaths is now one.)
Here’s Douglas Murray on Australia’s, and New Zealand’s, Covidocratic tyranny. Two slices:
The premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews, attracted notice this week with one particular threat. During a furious telling-off of the Australian public, Andrews announced: “There will be no removal of masks to consume alcohol outdoors. You will no longer be able to remove your mask to drink a cocktail at a pop-up beer-garden on a footpath as part of a pub crawl.”
Mr Andrews appears to believe that his job is to bully the electorate. Perhaps knowing that if Australians are willing to give up drinking outdoors then they will be willing to give up anything.
…..
The overreactions in both countries highlight the absolute absurdity of the zero-tolerance coronavirus approach. Either you prepare to live with minimal cases or you have to lock down a whole country when even one person gets the virus.
That latter approach will not just kill whole economies but kill everything else that is left of society too. No country can live like that. And if the island of New Zealand can’t rid itself of the virus entirely then most likely nobody can.
Hypothesis: the majority of people currently taking offense at analogies between lockdowns and the Taliban (or North Korea or other similar authoritarian regimes) are doing so primarily because these comparisons hit a little too close to home for their own comfort.
Yes, the comparisons involve a degree of hyperbole and intentionally so. But there’s more than enough of an authoritarian flavor to lockdowns, to the ways they were enacted, and to the basic curtailment of freedom that they entail to place them in the same ballpark as the types of policies that we usually associate with third world dictatorships or communist regimes.
Of course we also know that most of the offense taken here is feigned precisely because the very same people who get outraged at these comparisons spent the last 1.5 years indulging in far more severe hyperbole by likening even modest expressions of skepticism about lockdowns and masks to eugenics, ethnic cleansing, racism, and attempted murder.
TANSTAFPFC (There Ain’t No Such Thing As Free Protection From Covid.)
