No. 2,570
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Bredon O’Neill’s opening editorial is heavily tainted with
despair.
“Britain
seems to be in the grip of a death wish. Despite coronavirus being largely
defeated – hospital deaths are down by 99 per cent and hospitalisations by 96
per cent – we face new rules, stiff fines, panicky local lockdowns, and
quarantine when we return from overseas. It’s the new normal, everyone says.
But how long will this new normal last? Forever? Will we ever again go into a
shop with our faces uncovered?...”
For as long as the politicians, “experts” and the globalist
elites rule the roost, they can set the terms for our existence, for the
controlled and obliging populace is what they want. Forever and Ever. Designed
and intended to be managed. A submissive and obedient populace is their ideal
polity. Reason and practical policies
-- do lockdowns, masks, and social distancing really “work”? –they
have no measurable consequence other than to make things worse, and are
blatantly and expressively anti-social. They make living miserable, and also
cause one to be wary of the self-empowered and crusading Pecksmiths who roam
society in constant search of miscreants to sic the authorities on, to see
them practice their chokeholds and arm-twisting on assaulted, hapless
citizens.
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Nick Carter’s essay is more down to earth and dwells on the
specifics of totalitarian practices.
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Victoria:
Australia’s Covid autocracy
Freedoms, once surrendered, can be impossible to recover.
COLUMNIST
13th August 2020
“Exhibit A is the state of Victoria, where Covid-19 has
recently spread through the community in what might be called a second wave if
there had been a first wave, which there wasn’t.”
Carter’s essay is “ripe” with sober observations and lacks
the pining for better times that colors O’Neill’s essay (not that I don’t pine
for them to distraction myself).
Melbourne
residents who leave their homes between 8pm and 5am face a $5,000 fine, imposed
by police not the courts. Fines will also be issued to anyone who, a) is caught
without a mask; b) exercises for more than an hour; c) wanders further than 5km
from home; d) is judged by police to be shopping excessively (“excessively?” how full is one’s food cupboard when a cop
judges it “excessive”?) in the small number of shops allowed to stay open; e)
gets married; f) overnights in the house of someone other than their designated
intimate partner; g) goes fishing; or h) plays golf.
“You have
too many cans of tomato sauce and packs of pasta and meatballs. You’re under
arrest for excessive shopping.”
Most of the links I provide from UK and American newspapers
get it wrong about the Melbourne cop chokeholding a woman; it wasn’t over her
not wearing a mask, but about her violating the lockdown curfew, as I
gather from the news reports.
Victoria
became an autocracy overnight, granting unfettered power to
a premier unaccountable to parliament and freed from the rule of law. The
police have turned from citizens in uniform to the enforcers of ministerial
declarations, most of them quite absurd.
The
pandemic is revealing more uncomfortable truths by the day, like our
willingness to abandon our freedoms and traditions at the first whiff of
grapeshot.
Governments
mistrustful of citizens have been too quick to respond to risks to public
health with coercion, rather than simply appealing for a civic-minded people to
do the right thing.
In Australia there
has been a level of official control seldom seen since the convict era. There
has been barely any opposition. A people once prepared to make the ultimate
sacrifice of lives in defence of liberty is surrendering its freedom on the
pretext of saving lives.
It is
teaching us that when we dispense with the checks and balances that make
democratic governments better than they otherwise might be, there is an
exponential increase in the number and scale of state-induced blunders….
Nick Cater is
executive director of the Menzies Research Centre and a columnist with
the Australian.
I can think of no developments in the recent past I've been sorrier to have been right about than the morbid joy with which the political class has seized upon the opportunities presented by the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020, turning what should have been a temporary health emergency into the proverbial -- or is it pro-fictional -- boot on our faces. Most of us who began giving the mask-and-social-distancing hysteria the fish eye around last April were "reassured" that the disruptions would not extend past the "flattening of the curve" and the cessation of mass die-offs in New York and New Jersey nursing homes. How wrong we were. Millions of us, untouched by the WuFlu Of Death, have had our lives disrupted and impoverished in myriad ways, and can only wonder if we will ever see another "normal" not cursed with the modifier "new".
ReplyDeleteRevere: I don't think normal times will return in our lifetimes. The globalists and the political establishment have too strong a chokehold on our society and on us. They've bamboozeled everyone, even Trump.
ReplyDeleteA fine will be imposed if you get married??? Absolutely absurd and evil.
ReplyDeleteShaleen said: It truly makes me sad what has happened to Australia. The world keeps eliminating my bucket list. I am left with Japan and maybe Greece.
ReplyDelete