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Any and all updates regarding the COVID-19 will need a source provided. Please do your part in helping us to keep this thread maintainable and under control.
It is YOUR responsibility to fully read through the sources that you link, and you MUST provide a brief summary explaining what the source is about. Do not expect other people to do the work for you.
Conspiracy theories and fear mongering will absolutely not be tolerated in this thread. Expect harsh mod actions if you try to incite fear needlessly.
This is not a politics thread! You are allowed to post information regarding politics if it's related to the coronavirus, but do NOT discuss politics in here.
Added a disclaimer on page 662. Many need to post better. |
Oh, to be clear I don’t want to endorse the much-memed “do your own research” admonition. If the first time you’ve thought about a scientific topic is when it became relevant to a political opinion you want to support, you’re going to have an extremely hard time impartially considering evidence.
But a common problem these days is people lacking scientific expertise on a subject and needing to form judgments based on that science. One solution is to just blindly trust experts, but people are uncomfortable with that for a bunch of reasons (some of them not terrible reasons), and even then, it’s hard to know which experts to trust, make sure you’re understanding the experts’ conclusions correctly, etc.
My own solution, when I can manage it, is to check as much of their work as I can understand (good experts are usually happy to show their work, although you sometimes need quite a bit of background to understand it). If something about their work seems wrong to me I’ll try to have some humility and research deeper, usually someone somewhere has asked the same question I’m asking. Or if there’s somewhere I can pose the question myself (this thread isn’t a terrible option!), I’ll do that.
But I like to think all my posts here would be easy enough to follow for anyone with a basic understanding of science, and any terms they don’t know would be easily googled.
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On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:On December 03 2021 13:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Great example why there shouldn't be non-essential international travel. The entire idea that we still have tourists flying around so they can look at stuff is mind boggling. The SA travel ban was justified and smart. The travel ban should have been expanded to the entire planet other than essential travel, with global mandatory 2 week quarantine+testing. Define essential please. Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea. Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential? Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential? Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential? Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above. Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential? Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential? Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential? Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential? Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination. Show nested quote +
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not... Show nested quote +
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. so your whole point is: we're already fucked so another deep jabbing thrust means nothing.
what kind of argument is that?.
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On December 07 2021 15:12 xM(Z wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:On December 03 2021 13:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Great example why there shouldn't be non-essential international travel. The entire idea that we still have tourists flying around so they can look at stuff is mind boggling. The SA travel ban was justified and smart. The travel ban should have been expanded to the entire planet other than essential travel, with global mandatory 2 week quarantine+testing. Define essential please. Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea. Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential? Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential? Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential? Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above. Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential? Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential? Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential? Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential? Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. so your whole point is: we're already fucked so another deep jabbing thrust means nothing. what kind of argument is that?.
Yes and how odd to complain about the government being able to store all your phone and internet data for two years, the expansion of NSA powers and by extension the TSA, Patriot act etc.All of that was brought in after the 9/11 terror attacks by the government to ‘keep people safe’.
So he has seen how that turned out and didn’t like it.Can’t see it’s basically the same scenario playing out again and it doesn’t end with just needing to show some proof of vax to go overseas.Well i guess there are people who will roll over and there are those who will resist.
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On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:Show nested quote +On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:On December 03 2021 13:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Great example why there shouldn't be non-essential international travel. The entire idea that we still have tourists flying around so they can look at stuff is mind boggling. The SA travel ban was justified and smart. The travel ban should have been expanded to the entire planet other than essential travel, with global mandatory 2 week quarantine+testing. Define essential please. Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea. Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential? Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential? Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential? Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above. Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential? Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential? Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential? Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential? Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination. Show nested quote +
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not... Show nested quote +
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID.
I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus.
Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system.
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On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:On December 03 2021 13:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Great example why there shouldn't be non-essential international travel. The entire idea that we still have tourists flying around so they can look at stuff is mind boggling. The SA travel ban was justified and smart. The travel ban should have been expanded to the entire planet other than essential travel, with global mandatory 2 week quarantine+testing. Define essential please. Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea. Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential? Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential? Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential? Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above. Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential? Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential? Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential? Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential? Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system.
Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that?
And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA).
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On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:
[quote]
Define essential please.
Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea.
Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential?
Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential?
Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential?
Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above.
Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential?
Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential?
Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential?
Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential?
Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential?
Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential?
Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential?
Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential?
Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA).
Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions.
Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people.
To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever)
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On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable.
Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people. To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever)
When idiots finally get their vaccines and our hospitals arent at risk of overflowing every couples of weeks.
'Ive been fighting the gov everyday for the past 2 years, havent followed any recommandations, when will it finally end!!?'
Id be willing to quarantine any non vaccinated individual so the rest of us can enjoy our life tho.
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On December 08 2021 01:29 Erasme wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people. To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever) When idiots finally get their vaccines and our hospitals arent at risk of overflowing every couples of weeks. 'Ive been fighting the gov everyday for the past 2 years, havent followed any recommandations, when will it finally end!!?' Id be willing to quarantine any non vaccinated individual so the rest of us can enjoy our life tho.
Yeah, it is so fucking exhausting. The people who complain the loudest about the ongoing pandemics and the restrictions that go along with that are the exact same people who do their very best that the pandemic lasts as long as possible.
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On December 08 2021 01:29 Erasme wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:
[quote]
Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people. To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever) When idiots finally get their vaccines and our hospitals arent at risk of overflowing every couples of weeks. 'Ive been fighting the gov everyday for the past 2 years, havent followed any recommandations, when will it finally end!!?' Id be willing to quarantine any non vaccinated individual so the rest of us can enjoy our life tho.
Yes, complying with tyranny is how tyranny ends. That's exactly how it works.
Have you considered being angry at the people *actually doing the opression* instead of the scape goat "unvaccinated"? The vast majority of "unvaccinated" do not support any cohersion being applied to you.
Are you aware of the existence of countries, or states in the US, where people have not been coerced for almost a year now?
Morever: are you aware the vaccines won't end covid ?
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You are retarded.
I wish i could expand upon that statement, but you keep going in circle with your shitty args and I cba anymore.
You cant be bothered to read 2 lignes and go straight to "vaccines wont end covid", conveniently ignoring half of my post. Kindly stop spouting shitty ass statements tyvm.
Wearing a mask + getting vaccinated against a deadly disease = tyranny XD
Youd think a chilean would have a better definition of tyranny
User was warned for this post.
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On December 08 2021 01:59 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 08 2021 01:29 Erasme wrote:On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:
[quote]
No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people. To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever) When idiots finally get their vaccines and our hospitals arent at risk of overflowing every couples of weeks. 'Ive been fighting the gov everyday for the past 2 years, havent followed any recommandations, when will it finally end!!?' Id be willing to quarantine any non vaccinated individual so the rest of us can enjoy our life tho. Yes, complying with tyranny is how tyranny ends. That's exactly how it works. Have you considered being angry at the people *actually doing the opression* instead of the scape goat "unvaccinated"? The vast majority of "unvaccinated" do not support any cohersion being applied to you. Are you aware of the existence of countries, or states in the US, where people have not been coerced for almost a year now? Morever: are you aware the vaccines won't end covid ? Shockingly I am not mad at the people trying to fight a pandemic no.
And yes everyone here is well aware of states that pretend like Covid isn't real. Its also no coincidence such states have had their biggest death spikes in the latter half of these year while everyone else has seen fewer deaths then previously.
And shockingly we don't think thats a good thing.
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On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:On December 03 2021 16:16 Acrofales wrote:On December 03 2021 13:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Great example why there shouldn't be non-essential international travel. The entire idea that we still have tourists flying around so they can look at stuff is mind boggling. The SA travel ban was justified and smart. The travel ban should have been expanded to the entire planet other than essential travel, with global mandatory 2 week quarantine+testing. Define essential please. Let me give some examples and you can say yes/no so we can get some idea. Is an epidemiologist travelling to South Africa to study omicron essential? Is an aspiring epidemiologist travelling to Germany to start a residency in a hospital there essential? Is a university student studying medicine travelling from France to Norway for a 6-month exchange program (Erasmus) essential? Replace medical student with fine arts student in the situation above. Is a nurse from Kenya travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is an IT specialist from Bangalore travelling to the US for a new job essential? Is a Mexican bricklayer travelling to the US for a temp job on a construction site essential? Is a Mexican farm worker travelling to the US for a temp job harvesting tomatoes essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Pfizer's vaccine essential? Is a business trip to secure the supply line for Apple essential? Is a business trip to oversee construction of a new hotel in Southern Spain essential? Is a blue collar laborer going to spend a few days in a hotel in Southern Spain essential? Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable. Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system.
It really doesn't matter that these things are not at all alike. Most of the people in this thread are hellbent on using whatever false equivalences and whataboutisms to justify anything and everything the government wants to restrict for them. The government could announce tomorrow that to combat climate change you're not allowed to drive your car on Tuesdays and Thursdays and people in this thread would rush to defend it by saying "The government already imposes restrictions on driving like you're not allowed to drive on the wrong side of the road, so how is this any different?!?¿!!?"
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Northern Ireland25467 Posts
On December 08 2021 00:16 GoTuNk! wrote:Show nested quote +On December 07 2021 23:24 Acrofales wrote:On December 07 2021 22:49 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 07 2021 01:07 ggrrg wrote:On December 06 2021 23:42 GoTuNk! wrote:On December 06 2021 22:06 WombaT wrote:On December 06 2021 11:33 Acrofales wrote:On December 06 2021 08:41 Artisreal wrote:On December 06 2021 08:20 BlackJack wrote:On December 06 2021 05:33 Mohdoo wrote:
[quote]
Everything you described except the hotel stay would be approved by president Mohdoo. Anything that isn’t just fulfillment or emotional jacking yourself off is acceptable.
Fuck everyone whose livelihood is dependent on tourism, right? No, fuck a system that needlessly cannot handle a much needed pause in exhausting both people and planet. That's a rather different argument than COVID is too dangerous and therefore all non essential travel needs to be shut down for "forever". Rather than COVID it's stating tourism as an industry should just plain not exist, and we need to change the system to avoid it? Seems the wrong thread, but just for a brief exploration: Spain is not good agricultural land (mainly because most of it is a desert, and what isn't a desert is mountains) and isn't exactly the Ruhr area in terms of industrial productivity. What it does have is hundreds of kilometers of Mediterranean coastline, a legacy of art and architecture, a great cuisine and plenty of infrastructure for enjoying all of the above. Why is making money off these things inherently worse than making money off agricultural land or manufacturing industry? It’s not just tourism, I would assume most of us here don’t have all our friends/family close by within the same borders. My issue is/was tourism without meaningful restrictions/precautions, coming shortly enough after lockdowns. It’s a bit of a kick in the teeth and renders adherence at home feeling rather pointless. In a wider ecological sense it would make sense to reduce how much we travel (this includes work commutes), and the mechanisms we travel by, but it’s going to have negligible impact if we don’t look at our general consumption habits across the board. So on that level, and on a human level where tourism and travelling can really enrich one’s cultural life experiences I don’t see a sense in just banning it. There’s the tricky, still up in the air matter of Covid to deal with. The total elimination boat has long since sailed and is docked at Mohdoo IslandTM awaiting further instructions, but what’s the threshold of safe enough/the best we can do that would precipitate a return to normality? And how close are we collectively to that? To further your point, imagine thinking leisure travel should be restricted until at least an unforseeable future and not considering yourself a tyrant (supporter) lmao This argument would be a whole lot stronger if there weren't already tons of travel restrictions... Ever heard of borders and visas? Sure that's not much of an issue if you are from Japan, or Singapore or most Western countries, but good luck just traveling wherever you want if you are from Pakistan, or Palestine, or Kosovo, etc + Show Spoiler +. Not to mention that even with visa free travel you still have restrictions on how long you can stay. And sure, it's generally not your own government that restrics travel abroad but the government at your desired destination (is this even any different with the vaccine passports?) but for all practical purposes that's irrelevant. The "hassle" of getting a vaccine and the document alongside it amounted to two one hour trips to the doctor. In comparison getting a US visa for an extended trip some 15 years ago required calling the embassy at a bargain price of 2,99€/min to schedule an appointment, traveling 600km to said embassy for a meeting, and waiting months for approval... Don't even start me on getting a simple visa from Bulgaria to Germany 25 years ago, which included days spent at various institutions and the embassy, as well as months upon months of waiting (which is still the reality for most of the world's population). Sure, nowadays, if you are from a somewhat priviliged country and just want to spend a week at an all-inclusive resort abroad, it is not much of a hassle, but for anything beyond that you'll be facing various restrictions much more severe than requiring a proof of vaccination.
The most troubling aspect of this non sense is the casual leap from lets restrict travel/lockdown because of covid into because of climate change. If you think politicians/states are not already making that logic-leap aswell and will use climate change as an excuse to limit civil liberties, with a not so small of group happily cheering for permanent restrictions on travel and government monitoring of citizens, when covid dies off, you are extremely naive.
Whenever I hear somebody complaining about the "government monitoring" or "government control" that arises from Covid related actions, I wonder in what kind of utopia that person must be living. I have trouble seeing how "the monitoring" has increased beyond what is already required. I have to have a valid ID card that I must be able to present at any given moment if stopped by the police, I have to provide my current address and my income statement within narrow time frames or face fines, and so much more. Not to mention that in Germany there is something called "Vorratsdatenspeicherung" which forces all internet, phone, and mobile service providers to save all my transmitted data for 2 years, so the government can access it if they want. The government can literally know the location of my phone at any given moment in the past 2 years, as well as any website I have visited and probably much more beyond that. The US has it NSA, which also has limitless insight on anyone on US soil (and often enough abroad). Pretty sure many other countries have similar digital monitoring on their citizens. These things seem much more worrying than "the government" knowing if I am vaccinated or not...
Vaccine passport cards where "conspiracy theories" just 12 months ago. Now we are verging on 4th vaccine or lose your travel/work privileges in many countries.
In what practical way does the required vaccine passport differ from a regular passport when traveling? Good luck crossing a border without a valid ID. I'm just too tired to adress all your points, but showing your ID at airports and on extremely rare police encounters (which are not even logged if you don't get a ticket) is def not the same as showing a digital ID passport everytime you walk into closed space or get into a bus. Specially when showing said ID is just a formality rather than tracking your multiple vaccine status. It's written in the wall the next step will be adding certain "bad behaviours" to restrict travelling, like unpaid fines to the government or maybe missing child support payments, inching us closer to the chinese credit score system. Why? Seeing as these measures are very explicitly emergency measures to combat Covid, what makes you think it will go beyond that? And no, the patriot act cannot be referred to, because huge leeway was given in defining "terrorism", whereas the anti-covid measures are narrowly defined to combat the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. You can argue that the measures taken are draconian and unnecessary to combat the disease, but slippery slope reasoning about how measures against Covid will be used to "sneak" in other measures that have nothing to do with Covid in western democracies is ridiculous. Could someone like Erdogan or Putin latch onto curbing freedoms for Covid to curb freedoms in general? I guess. But Erdogan and Putin have a rather dismal record of curtailing peoples' freedoms anyway. You can see a clear pattern of intent in their actions to increasingly restrict their populations' freedoms. That same cannot be said for western Democracies (although I guess GH could probably make a case against this statement in the specific case of minorities in the USA). Well for starters, the fact that covid won't go away anytime soon, given it's a respiratory disease. They are not passing "laws" in most countries (as in votes by the parliament), it's the state dictating what measures will be taking and you are not allowed to question or resist them. Vaccines, masks and therapeutics are widely available for months now, there is nothing that justifies compulsory restrictions. Many western democracies are far more tyranical than both Putin and Erdogan on this regard, I wish that would raise at least some caution on more people. To put it another way. When does the emergency end and who gets to decide when it ends? Or are we just supposed to accept this will go on as long as covid exists (ie forever)
This is the salient point.
Essentially emergency powers need their scope and the conditions of their relaxation defined.
Of course, there have been developments in the interim with new variants and whatnot, the risk of which could be but the form could not be foreseen.
But after elimination became off the table early doors, and vaccines were effective but not a magic bullet, I at least am in the dark of what a win condition, or what threshold a return to relative normality actually looks like.
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I mean we've seen the scope and conditions of their relaxation in action pretty clearly. Its about hospitalization and more specifically ICU capacity. People filling up the hospitals make everything else worse. Most politicians at this point have accepted that lockdown and masking restrictions won't do anything to save the people who refuse to follow them and the ones that have followed them got vaccinated and aren't filling up hospitals.
The only real thing governments can do to save lives at this point is to increase the demand for vaccines. That there is so much resistance from the pro-covid crowd means that they have to apply more and more pressure to save them.
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United Kingdom13775 Posts
On December 08 2021 08:12 WombaT wrote:
But after elimination became off the table early doors, and vaccines were effective but not a magic bullet, I at least am in the dark of what a win condition, or what threshold a return to relative normality actually looks like.
Reach some acceptable compromise of safety vs normalcy and manage the existence of the disease in the population at large. Unless you're one of those "I'm willing to give up whatever it takes on behalf of anyone to feel safe from this disease" hardliners, there's going to be some balance that will make sense.
My personal take is:
- increase ICU capacity to avoid running out (no excuses for that two years in)
- get 1-2 doses of vaccine into as many people as possible globally, optional boosters as supplies allow
- relax all pandemic-era measures and accept some level of elevated death for the next year or two
Given that we're way too late to stop the disease before it starts, herd immunity isn't happening, and lockdown measures have laughable levels of compliance in previously highly-obedient regions, I think the above is the best we can do.
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I'm pretty sure the limiting factor when it comes to ICUs is the lack of staff, not the lack of beds themselves. I don't think two years is nearly enough time to train more people, but I may be wrong.
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On December 08 2021 08:50 maybenexttime wrote:
I'm pretty sure the limiting factor when it comes to ICUs is the lack of staff, not the lack of beds themselves. I don't think two years is nearly enough time to train more people, but I may be wrong. exactly, beds are easy but they are useless without personal to take care of those patients and finding the personal goes well beyond training them. You also need to get enough people actually willing to be trained. Its not a job for just anyone.
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EPT
