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next you know they'll be wanting to have weddings, funerals, concerts, sporting events...
Yes, and all of those will start a phased reopening in NSW from next Monday and restrictions will be stood down pretty much completely from December 1. The exception being masks required on planes and public transport, and density limits in some cases.
That's it.
Quote:
From December 1, the final stage in the reopening plan, there will be no limit on the number of visitors to a home and density limits for hospitality, retail, gyms and personal services such as hairdressers will increase to one person per two square metres.
All the eased restrictions at this stage will apply to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
The Premier said localised stay-at-home orders were possible even after the state exits lockdown, for example if case numbers in a particular area are too high.
“[But] once you get to December 1 and you have 90 per cent fully vaccinated, the chances of having any of those strict measures are very unlikely,” she said.
She said we would never experience anything like the current months-long lockdown again.
Yes, and all of those will start a phased reopening in NSW from next Monday and restrictions will be stood down pretty much completely from December 1. The exception being masks required on planes and public transport, and density limits in some cases.
Watch as the "unvaccinated" (normal people prior to the thought reform campaign) become lepers in society. Nonpeople.
And it will happen to cheers, likes and Tik Tok videos.
You see how that works?
Quote:
Thought reform is not mysterious. It is the systematic application of psychological and social influence techniques in an organized programmatic way within a constructed and managed environment (6,7,8,9,10). The goal is to produce specific attitudinal and behavioral changes. The changes occur incrementally without its being patently visible to those undergoing the process that their attitudes and behavior are being changed a step at a time according to the plan of those directing the program.
In society there are numerous elaborate attempts to influence attitudes and modify behavior. However, thought reform programs can be distinguished from other social influence efforts because of their totalistic scope and their sequenced phases aimed at destabilizing participants' sense of self, sense of reality, and values. Thought reform programs rely on organized peer pressure, the development of bonds between the leader or trainer and the followers, the control of communication, and the use of a variety of influence techniques. The aim of all this is to promote conformity, compliance, and the adoption of specific attitudes and behaviors desired by the group. Such a program is further characterized by the manipulation of the person's total social environment to stabilize and reinforce the modified behavior and attitude changes (8,9,10).
Mao Tsetung makes the existential distinction between the two groups quite
explicit:
Under the leadership of the working class and the Communist Party,
these classes [the people] unite together to form their own state and
elect their own government [so as to] carry out a dictatorship over the
lackeys of imperialism. . . . These two aspects, namely, democracy
among the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, combine to
form the people's democratic dictatorship ... . to the hostile classes
the state apparatus is the instrument of oppression. It is violent, and not
"benevolent." . . . Our benevolence applies only to the people, and
not to the reactionary acts of the reactionaries and reactionary classes
outside the people.16
Being "outside the people," the reactionaries are presumably
nonpeople. Under conditions of ideological totalism, in China and
elsewhere, nonpeople have often been put to death, their executioners then becoming guilty (in Camus' phrase) of "crimes of
logic." But the thought reform process is one means by which nonpeople are permitted, through a change in attitude and personal
character, to make themselves over into people. The most literal
example of such dispensing of existence and nonexistence is to be
found in the sentence given to certain political criminals: execution
in two years' time, unless during that two-year period they have
demonstrated genuine progress in their reform.
People are free to protest those things where there aren’t current laws against mass gatherings, and in cities/town with no current restrictions on such, they are able to do so and do.
It’s not the protests that are unlawful under lockdown it’s the gathering of people in numbers.
Those laws apply to all people in those jurisdictions whether you’re protesting or otherwise.
If you make exceptions for the protestors, you need to make exceptions for everyone.
And BLM protests were about police violence. Why are you making a distinction? It’s funny in a thread about supposed tyranny you separate people protesting police violence from people protesting police overreach and other freedom.
I would have thought they were both valid.
And I wonder where the “just comply with the police and you won’t get shot” crowd are. It’s a different story it seems when suburbanite Aussies are the ones causing civil unrest.
You actually do make exceptions for protesters. That is what separates a free nation from a dictatorship--that important exception. If you don't allow protests there is no way the citizenry can challenge anything the government does. That is a blank check for arbitrary abuse of power.
I don't agree with confining people without due process of law, but if they are doing that, protests must be allowed to happen.
You actually do make exceptions for protesters. That is what separates a free nation from a dictatorship--that important exception. If you don't allow protests there is no way the citizenry can challenge anything the government does. That is a blank check for arbitrary abuse of power.
I don't agree with confining people without due process of law, but if they are doing that, protests must be allowed to happen.
I respect that point of view.
Is protesting in the street in numbers during an outbreak the only way to protest though? Is that the only way to challenge what the government does?
Because I don't think the protests that have happened so far have actually changed anything.
Why would that happen? Restrictions will be lifted for all people, including those who haven't been vaccinated.
There are plenty of people who are not vaccinated because they are medically not eligible if they've had Covid in the last 6 months, or who are medically cautioned. They are specifically recognised as exempt in the guidelines.
There are some that choose not to be and they are left out of the initial reopening (officially, but see below) until the rest of the population gets vaccinated.
But after December 1st, restrictions are lifted for everyone.
There's some fantasy put forth by the gov of NSW that businesses have to check people's vax status in the runup to Dec 1. I got the business reopening guidelines email, being a licensed business.
That ain't happening. First, there's no vax passport to check. Second, no business is going to put their 17 year old server in charge of barring irate customers from entry, for example. Third, the police said they aren't going to enforce it.
It will go the way of the Dodo, and people's individual choice to vax or not will remain such. There are some jobs that will require it, teaching, healthcare, aged care, and travel.
Apart from that - once they open the floodgates (first stage of reopening may be moved forward to this Friday) there will be no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
NSW may officially reopen on the 1st of December, but what about Victoria? From what I've been reading, the criteria are a moving-target, "situational", and not calendar-driven. And let's not be so sure, that a reopening won't be followed by a re-closing. Note that California "re-opened" for the first time in the summer of 2020... only to re-close, at least partially. Then in June of 2021, mask-mandates expired... only to be reimposed a month later. Now our 'rona numbers are falling rapidly, suggesting perhaps a re-opening in November or thereabouts. But what if there's an Epsilon variant in February? Then we're right back to mask-mandates and capacity limits and "suggestions" to stay home.
Were there to have been a perhaps rigid but brief lockdown, in this country or that, in this city or that, then the residents would have treated these measures as an unpleasant but necessary evil. I recall that in March of 2020, there was considerbale good-will towards the then-two-week lockdown. Instead we're taunted, baited-and-switched. Vaccinations rates are insufficient, by whatever measure. So, the vaccinated are punished together with the unvaccinated. If one of the children in class misbehaves, the entire class is punished.
Note the quip, that the hardest part of a two-week lockdown to flatten the curve, is the first 500 days. This isn't mere sarcasm. It's a reflection of emergency-powers being invoked arbitrarily.
NSW may officially reopen on the 1st of December, but what about Victoria? From what I've been reading, the criteria are a moving-target, "situational", and not calendar-driven. And let's not be so sure, that a reopening won't be followed by a re-closing. Note that California "re-opened" for the first time in the summer of 2020... only to re-close, at least partially. Then in June of 2021, mask-mandates expired... only to be reimposed a month later. Now our 'rona numbers are falling rapidly, suggesting perhaps a re-opening in November or thereabouts. But what if there's an Epsilon variant in February? Then we're right back to mask-mandates and capacity limits and "suggestions" to stay home.
Were there to have been a perhaps rigid but brief lockdown, in this country or that, in this city or that, then the residents would have treated these measures as an unpleasant but necessary evil. I recall that in March of 2020, there was considerbale good-will towards the then-two-week lockdown. Instead we're taunted, baited-and-switched. Vaccinations rates are insufficient, by whatever measure. So, the vaccinated are punished together with the unvaccinated. If one of the children in class misbehaves, the entire class is punished.
Note the quip, that the hardest part of a two-week lockdown to flatten the curve, is the first 500 days. This isn't mere sarcasm. It's a reflection of emergency-powers being invoked arbitrarily.
Even in the most restriction-happy jurisdictions, the covid measures have been gradually declining in intensity. States are tolerating covid case and hospitalization numbers that would have been classified "severe" a year ago and justified a lockdown. Now it's indoor mask mandates that people....mostly....follow. But even in my pro-mask town, the mask discipline has been waning and people are freaking out less about someone not wearing it or wearing it right. Despite the hospitals being pretty close to full but not quite overrun.
I expect after the next variant the pharma companies will figure out how to tweak the vaccines more quickly. There will be covid boosters every 6-12 months for those that want them. Masks will come back for a while if waves are bad but gradually decline overall.
Australia probably won't do this again, especially once they get most of the population vaccinated. Despite being a rich country they are a good 6-8 months behind us on vaccines.
Whether Australia or anyone else does this again, depends on how much fear has permeated our psyche, and scrambled the weighing of personal liberties vs. risk-aversion. If we come to regard ourselves as wards of the state, then the state aggrandizing to itself more power, would be viewed with ho-hum disappointment at most. Compliance would be broad, and dissent would be sporadic, poorly organized and ineffective.
Note today the pejorative dismissal of "Muh Free-dumbs". Heard that phrase often? The term itself, is positively dripping with the condescension normally reserved for the truly delusional and sophomoric. It's told to teenagers wondering why daddy won't buy them a sports car. It implies that the very premise of the assertion, would not be entertained by serious people, with any sense of responsibility or decency. If "Muh Free-dumbs" generally don't matter, then what prevents another and another perverse expansion of state power?
I really wish, that we'd come to truly believe, not that any one of us is somehow immune (vaccinated or not), or that only the other guy is vulnerable, or that the virus is somehow an exaggeration or a trick... but that instead, that we'd learn and internalize Caesar's speech, in Act II Scene 2 of the play:
"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
Last I heard the number is now up to six top government officials who have resigned. I don't know if they all got bribes by Big Pharma or if there were other reasons.
Last I heard the number is now up to six top government officials who have resigned. I don't know if they all got bribes by Big Pharma or if there were other reasons.
Twaddle!
If you're going to come up with posts like this, at least have some substance and facts to go with them.
Three 'high level' State Government officials have resigned for various reasons, none of which have anything to do with Big Pharma (or bribes, as far as I know). Read about them here to get the facts. I won't spoon feed you.
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