[Catallaxy] I have just completed reading "A State of Fear" by Laura Dodsworth, subtitled "How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid 19 pandemic". I strongly recommend that people who suspect we are being manipulated read it. There is too much to digest to be able to sum it up succinctly but I will quote from the third to last chapter:Fear has created a morality play where heavy-handed discussions about society wide vaccine mandates and Covid certificates, or vaccine passports, are privileged over personal responsibility and risk. Does your happy ending involve personal responsibility or state mandates? In the desperate desire to end the horrible story of the Covid-19 pandemic we are rushing towards a conclusion without being certain enough of our values.From the last chapter:
The Covid-19 epidemic may prove to be the biggest campaign of fear the UK, and the world, has ever seen.....the almost imperceptible stripping away of rights and freedoms, as the people and their government gradually separate, is an old story repeated throughout history, but avoidable if we choose to learn from it,
And:
We seem to have forgotten that no one is safe. You have never been safe and you never will be. Nor will I. In the blind global panic of an epidemic we have forgotten how to analyse risk. If you don’t accept that you will die one day, that you can never be safe, then you are a sitting duck for authoritarian policies which purport to be for your safety. If too many individuals immolate their liberty for safety we risk a bonfire of freedoms.
Australian citizens have been played for mugs as well and vaccination will not save them. Here in the state of darkness our "lockdown" partially ended today but apparently we had not been good enough to be set free and still have mandates for masks, no singing or dancing allowed and other trivial restrictions will continue until we have been really good — sickening stuff. (The dancing ban reminded me of a story my father told years ago about the Methodists banning having sex standing up as they feared it might lead to dancing).