Coronavirus/COVID-19

The protestors are living evidence for the theories propounded by British documentary maker Adam Curtis. He believes that the chaos and complexity that engulfed Western society from the 1970s onwards killed the collective movements that drove humanity throughout the rest of the 20th Century. Faced with problems they couldn't understand or change, the middle class turned inwards to change themselves instead. Jogging, yoga, meditation, the gym involved turning in to the self, not out to society. You make yourself better, and this makes the world better...well for you anyway, and those like you. Thatcher and Reagan's policies confirmed these beliefs.

The wellness movement grew out of this. YOU are the most important being on the planet, and YOUR rights are sacrosanct - you the individual, not plural. That's why those protesting aren't particularly bothered if they march alongside thugs or Nazis; although a march is a collective they are standing for the rights of the INDIVIDUAL, and the individual is the centre of the universe.

JustAdamCurtis - YouTube

 
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"The state and the market approached people with an offer that could not be refused. ‘Become individuals,’ they said. ‘Marry whomever you desire, without asking permission from your parents. Take up whatever job suits you, even if community elders frown. Live wherever you wish, even if you cannot make it every week to the family dinner. You are no longer dependent on your family or your community. We, the state and the market, will take care of you instead. We will provide food, shelter, education, health, welfare and employment. We will provide pensions, insurance and protection.’

...

But the liberation of the individual comes at a cost. Many of us now bewail the loss of strong families and communities and feel alienated and threatened by the power the impersonal state and market wield over our lives. States and markets composed of alienated individuals can intervene in the lives of their members much more easily than states and markets composed of strong families and communities. When neighbours in a high-rise apartment building cannot even agree on how much to pay their janitor, how can we expect them to resist the state?

The deal between states, markets and individuals is an uneasy one. The state and the market disagree about their mutual rights and obligations, and individuals complain that both demand too much and provide too little. In many cases individuals are exploited by markets, and states employ their armies, police forces and bureaucracies to persecute individuals instead of defending them. Yet it is amazing that this deal works at all – however imperfectly. For it breaches countless generations of human social arrangements. Millions of years of evolution have designed us to live and think as community members. Within a mere two centuries we have become alienated individuals. Nothing testifies better to the awesome power of culture."

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari
 

The Buck

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The protestors are living evidence for the theories propounded by British documentary maker Adam Curtis. He believes that the chaos and complexity that engulfed Western society from the 1970s onwards killed the collective movements that drove humanity throughout the rest of the 20th Century. Faced with problems they couldn't understand or change, the middle class turned inwards to change themselves instead. Jogging, yoga, meditation, the gym involved turning in to the self, not out to society. You make yourself better, and this makes the world better...well for you anyway, and those like you. Thatcher and Reagan's policies confirmed these beliefs.

The wellness movement grew out of this. YOU are the most important being on the planet, and YOUR rights are sacrosanct - you the individual, not plural. That's why those protesting aren't particularly bothered if they march alongside thugs or Nazis; although a march is a collective they are standing for the rights of the INDIVIDUAL, and the individual is the centre of the universe.

JustAdamCurtis - YouTube



And:

 
-They broke the law! -A law cannot violate a higher law like the constitution! -And it not condoning a medical treatment done on your own body is NOT breaking a law!!!

Why is it a law? Because doing it harms others. And freedom of choice in not getting a vaccine comes with consequences that may harm others or may put the health system under so much pressure it harms others. So the govt want the FREEDOM to move quickly and put in place restrictions that might stop people who don't vaccinate harming others either directly or indirectly.

Perhaps you should be marching around Kirribilli house mate (unless he's in Hawaii again). Scotty from marketing has the power to veto the State govt proposals (or get the Gov Gen to do so) if they do not comply with the Australian Constitution:

a State Parliament can make laws on any subject of relevance to that particular State. Subject to a few exceptions, the Australian Constitution does not confine the matters about which the States may make laws. (The most important exceptions are that the States cannot impose duties of customs and excise
(section 90) and cannot raise defence forces without the consent of the Commonwealth Parliament (section 114).) Accordingly, the State Parliaments can pass laws on a wider range of subjects than the Commonwealth Parliament, and for this reason important areas such as education, criminal law, and roads are regulated primarily by laws of the States rather than by laws of the Commonwealth Parliament.

A subject of the Queen, resident in any State, shall not be subject in any other State to any disability or discrimination which would not be equally applicable to him if he were a subject of the Queen resident in such other State.

When a law of a State is inconsistent with a law of the Commonwealth, the latter shall prevail, and the former shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be invalid.
 

Arkangel

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Well this thread is a bit of a sprawl.

I haven't been allowed intro the country for the last couple of years, but after the opening of the international border to citizens was announced, I will finally get the chance to see my extended family again in the next few weeks. Because they pretty much all live in Victoria, and because I knew very little about what this pandemic bill being debated actually involved, I went searching for information about its motivation and the major criticisms people have of it. Based on my admittedly limited search, and on a quick read of the proposed legislation itself (which, as someone who is neither a lawyer nor a political junkie, was perhaps not very revealing), one issue that stands out to me as a reasonable criticism is the lack of parliamentary oversight on the extension of pandemic-related states of emergency that the bill would imply. Perhaps those who are more au fait with the debate and don't believe this is a concern can explain to me why this is so. Other than that, most of the more "controversial" components of the bill seem fairly reasonable to me. Perhaps those who don't agree can explain their additional objections (keeping in mind that, as mentioned above, I am fairly naïve to the whole thing, so you can't assume too much about what I do know).

I also disagree with the characterisation of anti-vaccination and other related protest movements as indicating a societal tendency toward individualism. It seems to me that one of the primary features of such movements is their communality. Sure, the relevant communities haven't been formed in the same way as what we might be used to---through familiy ties, localities, or ethnic groups---but that doesn't mean that they are disconnected groups of individuals only out for themselves. If anything, I'd say they're more related to so-called "resistance cultures", of the sort one sees develop in many schools, where subsets of students reject the standard norms of educational culture (despite the fact that this resistance often seems to work against their best interests, and is related to drop-out, discipline problems, substance abuse, etc.).

On another note, I don't think the presence of extremist crazies at a protest can really be used to impugn the motives of everyone attending it. I'm sure I went to protest marches when I was younger where a substantial minority of those in attendance wanted to overthrow the government in some sort of glorious communist revolution. That doesn't mean that I agreed with, or was being sucked into, their agenda; at the time I just decided that the issue on which the protest was focused was important enough that I could cope with standing next to a few weirdos. (Over time, this made me more and more uncomfortable, to the point that I don't think I've protested anything since I was an undergraduate. To each their own, though.) That doesn't seem like an unreasonable or incomprehensible position to me. That said, it usually wasn't the communists, or the anarchists, who were organising these protests themselves, which may not be the case with regard to the recent events in Melbourne---I honestly don't know.
 
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Well this thread is a bit of a sprawl.

I haven't been allowed intro the country for the last couple of years, but after the opening of the international border to citizens was announced, I will finally get the chance to see my extended family again in the next few weeks. Because they pretty much all live in Victoria, and because I knew very little about what this pandemic bill being debated actually involved, I went searching for information about its motivation and the major criticisms people have of it. Based on my admittedly limited search, and on a quick read of the proposed legislation itself (which, as someone who is neither a lawyer nor a political junkie, was perhaps not very revealing), one issue that stands out to me as a reasonable criticism is the lack of parliamentary oversight on the extension of pandemic-related states of emergency that the bill would imply. Perhaps those who are more au fait with the debate and don't believe this is a concern can explain to me why this is so. Other than that, most of the more "controversial" components of the bill seem fairly reasonable to me. Perhaps those who don't agree can explain their additional objections (keeping in mind that, as mentioned above, I am fairly naïve to the whole thing, so you can't assume too much about what I do know).

I also disagree with the characterisation of anti-vaccination and other related protest movements as indicating a societal tendency toward individualism. It seems to me that one of the primary features of such movements is their communality. Sure, the relevant communities haven't been formed in the same way as what we might be used to---through familiy ties, localities, or ethnic groups---but that doesn't mean that they are disconnected groups of individuals only out for themselves. If anything, I'd say they're more related to so-called "resistance cultures", of the sort one sees develop in many schools, where subsets of students reject the standard norms of educational culture (despite the fact that this resistance often seems to work against their best interests, and is related to drop-out, discipline problems, substance abuse, etc.).

On another note, I don't think the presence of extremist crazies at a protest can really be used to impugn the motives of everyone attending it. I'm sure I went to protest marches when I was younger where a substantial minority of those in attendance wanted to overthrow the government in some sort of glorious communist revolution. That doesn't mean that I agreed with, or was being sucked into, their agenda; at the time I just decided that the issue on which the protest was focused was important enough that I could cope with standing next to a few weirdos. (Over time, this made me more and more uncomfortable, to the point that I don't think I've protested anything since I was an undergraduate. To each their own, though.) That doesn't seem like an unreasonable or incomprehensible position to me. That said, it usually wasn't the communists, or the anarchists, who were organising these protests themselves, which may not be the case with regard to the recent events in Melbourne---I honestly don't know.

Very balanced post. I like this.
 
I haven't been allowed intro the country for the last couple of years, but after the opening of the international border to citizens was announced, I will finally get the chance to see my extended family again in the next few weeks. Because they pretty much all live in Victoria, and because I knew very little about what this pandemic bill being debated actually involved, I went searching for information about its motivation and the major criticisms people have of it. Based on my admittedly limited search, and on a quick read of the proposed legislation itself (which, as someone who is neither a lawyer nor a political junkie, was perhaps not very revealing), one issue that stands out to me as a reasonable criticism is the lack of parliamentary oversight on the extension of pandemic-related states of emergency that the bill would imply. Perhaps those who are more au fait with the debate and don't believe this is a concern can explain to me why this is so. Other than that, most of the more "controversial" components of the bill seem fairly reasonable to me. Perhaps those who don't agree can explain their additional objections (keeping in mind that, as mentioned above, I am fairly naïve to the whole thing, so you can't assume too much about what I do know).
I will address the extension issue. The time limit in declaration of a SoE for pandemics is one unique to Victoria among the mainland states in that no equivalent time-limit exists in the other mainland states (see NSW recently proposing to extend their SoE into 2023).
The balancing requirement is that the declaration now has to be made by an elected official and that the recommendations have to be made public, a requirement that doesn't exist now in Victoria or (as I understand it) most other states. In the past a SoE would not be required to be for an extended period of time as it was unlikely that it would extend that far (e.g. bushfires, floods). Water restrictions rarely lasted near 6 months, so the issue with needing to recall parliament periodically to extend a SoE never occurred previously.

In practical terms, under the new legislation Dan would have had to declare that the curfew was not part of the CHO recommendations and the 'masks everywhere' recommendation from the CHO would have to disclose the basis upon that was reached. According to two epidemiologists in the office (who are very pro-disclosure of information), the mask requirement when recommended to VicGov was based on 65 studies which demonstrated an extremely robust rationale for mask wearing indoors, and less robust evidence for mask wearing outdoors.
The argument for higher thresholds for disclosure would mean the anti-masker arguments about mask in indoor setting would have been far easier to counter and it's likely the debate would be less about 'masks vs no masks' than it would be 'masks indoors vs masks everywhere'.
 

Freshwater

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How can anyone think locking out unvaccinated or half vaccinated 12-15 years olds is justified? There is surely no doctors recommending this? This is just an example of the many bizarre, unscientific decisions of the Victorian government. Do they ever say “we are at 90%, let’s just leave the people alone for a while”???
 
My niece and nephew aged 14 and 10 in Ireland have got COVID but their mum & dad , both vaccinated with AZ, have tested negative twice with the rapid antigen test. They’re all isolating at home and doing well. The kids have a heavy cold.
 
My niece and nephew aged 14 and 10 in Ireland have got COVID but their mum & dad , both vaccinated with AZ, have tested negative twice with the rapid antigen test. They’re all isolating at home and doing well. The kids have a heavy cold.
Good luck, hope it stays mild
 

footscray1973

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Andrews called them Nazis last week in parliament.

Saying it over and over on here doesn't make it true. All the recent references to Nazis and comparisons to them by a politician have been by Bernie Finn, also Jewish leaders condemning the references by Finn and other Libs. Where did Andrews call anyone a Nazi in Parliament?

Also had to laugh as the post you replied to challenged a number of assertions you keep making, yet again you can not back any of them with FACTS. so you ignore them. Again.
 

Freshwater

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Saying it over and over on here doesn't make it true. All the recent references to Nazis and comparisons to them by a politician have been by Bernie Finn, also Jewish leaders condemning the references by Finn and other Libs. Where did Andrews call anyone a Nazi in Parliament?

Also had to laugh as the post you replied to challenged a number of assertions you keep making, yet again you can not back any of them with FACTS. so you ignore them. Again.
Saying it over and over on here doesn't make it true. All the recent references to Nazis and comparisons to them by a politician have been by Bernie Finn, also Jewish leaders condemning the references by Finn and other Libs. Where did Andrews call anyone a Nazi in Parliament?

Also had to laugh as the post you replied to challenged a number of assertions you keep making, yet again you can not back any of them with FACTS. so you ignore them. Again.
Wasn’t hard to find, because I actually heard him say it on the news. We were all taking the poss out of it last Saturday when talking with Muslims and even Jews that apparently they are Nazis?🤣
A55965CB-4727-4A84-9942-E3B96EE75697.jpeg
 

LittleG

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Wasn’t hard to find, because I actually heard him say it on the news. We were all taking the poss out of it last Saturday when talking with Muslims and even Jews that apparently they are Nazis?View attachment 1286976

That doesn’t say what you think it says. There is a keyword in there: and
 
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King Harold

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That doesn’t say what you think it says. There is a keyword in there: and

Give up LG , our friend freshwater is now so far down a rabbit hole , he is using some rather misleading language.
Expect not to get a response from him .
 

Freshwater

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Give up LG , our friend freshwater is now so far down a rabbit hole , he is using some rather misleading language.
Expect not to get a response from him .
I am only replying to a request that asked whether Dan Andrews called the protesters last week Nazis. You may not agree with my views but I never make up stuff and I haven’t here. I heard and seen him say it on the news. It’s kind of silly having to justify what is factual. If you don’t like, or do like, what he said, this is the forum, but he said it let’s move on.
 

King Harold

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Wasn’t hard to find, because I actually heard him say it on the news. We were all taking the poss out of it last Saturday when talking with Muslims and even Jews that apparently they are Nazis?🤣View attachment 1286976
I am only replying to a request that asked whether Dan Andrews called the protesters last week Nazis. You may not agree with my views but I never make up stuff and I haven’t here. I heard and seen him say it on the news. It’s kind of silly having to justify what is factual. If you don’t like, or do like, what he said, this is the forum, but he said it let’s move on.

No , but you did not put any context to the quote.
Most that read your post would assume Andrews called all the protesters Nazis , which is patently untrue.
Cherry picking single sentences should be the confined to Sky and Fox News.
 

The Buck

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I am only replying to a request that asked whether Dan Andrews called the protesters last week Nazis. You may not agree with my views but I never make up stuff and I haven’t here. I heard and seen him say it on the news. It’s kind of silly having to justify what is factual. If you don’t like, or do like, what he said, this is the forum, but he said it let’s move on.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master - - that's all."

(Through the Looking Glass, Chapter 6)
 

LittleG

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No , but you did not put any context to the quote.
Most that read your post would assume Andrews called all the protesters Nazis , which is patently untrue.
Cherry picking single sentences should be the confined to Sky and Fox News.

You (& freshwater) missed the AND between the Antivaxxers AND Neo Nazis….

Andrews described them as two seperate groups…. Two seperate groups!!!!


Come on boys! This is basic comprehension.
 

King Harold

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You (& freshwater) missed the AND between the Antivaxxers AND Neo Nazis….

Andrews described them as two seperate groups…. Two seperate groups!!!!


Come on boys! This is basic comprehension.

Yes absolutely the point , that’s exactly what I was saying—-
 

footscray1973

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Wasn’t hard to find, because I actually heard him say it on the news. We were all taking the poss out of it last Saturday when talking with Muslims and even Jews that apparently they are Nazis?🤣View attachment 1286976

Wow. Are you serious?! You are either stupid or deluded, but I suspect both. Try reading it again, or better still get a year 6 to explain the context to you.

Tell me again about how widely read you are!
Bahahahaha
 
You can quibble about the term Nazi as much as you like. Personally I'd prefer he used the correct nomenclature of fascist because unlike Nazi's they dont exclude race, religions or suburban mums and dads. There's no denying what Andrews said was substantively correct. One only needs to look at the latest LNP round of political advertising that is on-line to see that they have completely co-opted the anti-everything, no real answers, Bad Dan rhetoric of these groups.

Groups that have been exposed for their links to far-right and fringe christian ultra conservative movements.

If you lay down with mangy dogs, you can expect your fleas to get pointed out.
 
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