[Sivad]

[SolarCross]

Have you watched that Bill Gates interview where he openly discusses digital travel certificates? That's gonna do away with both informed consent and freedom of movement. Right now 2/3 of the US is in favor of interstate travel restrictions. The mayor of LA just told everyone to snitch out their neighbors, he said "snitches get rewards". They even got Karen drones flying around harassing people. Right of assembly has basically been abolished, and that curtails speech and religious freedom as well. And coronavirus is being used as a pretext to violate the 2nd amendment in city after city. If you're not worried then you're just not paying attention.

Why do you think people like Donna and PoD fucking love this so much? They see it as a big opportunity to flulag the world and control everything. Whenever you see all the little aspiring totalitarians drooling over a crisis it's time to start rowing in the opposite direction.

Bill Gates is very popular with the conspiracy theorists now. I recently watched a presentation by a famous conspiracy theorist called David Icke, if you have not heard of him David Icke is the original Alex Jones, and of course Bill Gates gets mentioned a lot. I'll admit I find Bill Gates creepy and his software is garbage but I am not sold on the idea that he is a shill for the Illuminati or whoever.

It is absolutely legitimate to question everything and even be a bit suspicious of stuff but one should keep a grip on the paranoia. As for digital identity, I have seen this:

Are you in favour of open borders? Probably not, so you would want most if not all transit gates into the US guarded against terrorists, assassins or other criminals entering in the country. The easy way to do that is shut down the borders entirely DPRK style. But if you still want to allow freedom of movement then the transit points can be selectively opened for good eggs and barred to bad eggs but only if you know their identity. Okay so if you would shut the door on kiddie rapist or a wannabe suicide bomber or CPC spy or whatever then why not shut the door on someone carrying an infectious disease? Again the same problem. The easy way it is to block everyone DPRK style or... we can selectively open the door to those based on whether they have evidence of being clean of anything nasty but that requires identity.

You already have paper certificates.. you have or could get a passport, a birth certificate, a social security number etc but they probably open more doors than they close, no? Why not digital certificates?

I take your point entirely as far as the gulagists go, this is the whole premise of this thread after all. I agree I would not trust Donna or POD with.. well I don't trust them with anything at all, lol. I don't trust Corbyn either and for the same reasons. So it is that given disasters, wars and pandemics are things that can happen (and always have, read about the Black Death...) and one can never know exactly when they will happen or not then we have to always be prepared and make sure that we have trustworthy people in the relevant offices.

[Tainari88]

well the Mexicans are definitely in their homes. But? No one is being penalized for being out in bicycles, motorcycles, cars and running around the city. I have not seen any forced orders of any kind. I don't see people being dragged out of their homes at all. In fact, I think the Mexicans themselves plead with people to be safe and stay home. But if they are out there eating tacos no one is stopping them. The Mexicans have always been like that as far as I can tell.

[snapdragon]

What that illustration doesn't show is the man next to the dog walker refusing to comply with social distancing, thereby infecting all and sundry, who have no choice but to be out there.

There's too many of them, unfortunately.

It's time to close the parks. I don't give a shit whether those morons die of coronavirus.

I do give a shit they are infecting decent people.

[Godstud]

The short answer to that question? No.

The long answer? Absolutely not.

[SolarCross]

This old man gets it.

[Atlantis]

No, the pandemic demonstrates the danger of voting for right-wing populists. Trump's botched response is well known and the UK's figures will increase due to

- lack of testing
- wrong strategy,
- wrong communication, and
- de-funding of the NHS

Both the UK and the US are in a position in which they should have been able to avoid a major outbreak by timely action.

I don't know what Corbyn would have done, but it's hard to beat the mess created by Johnson.

The virus doesn't believe in populist slogans.

[snapdragon]

Both Corbyn and Starmer say they would have carried out more testing, especially of frontline workers.

One thing I'm pretty sure of, is that they wouldn't have been going round shaking hands like the fuckwit Bozo.

[skinster]

This old man gets it.

He seemed lonely out there.

[wat0n]

No, the pandemic demonstrates the danger of voting for right-wing populists. Trump's botched response is well known and the UK's figures will increase due to

- lack of testing
- wrong strategy,
- wrong communication, and
- de-funding of the NHS

Both the UK and the US are in a position in which they should have been able to avoid a major outbreak by timely action.

I don't know what Corbyn would have done, but it's hard to beat the mess created by Johnson.

The virus doesn't believe in populist slogans.

I highly doubt it'd have been any different, skinster and others have pointed towards countries with fake data no one believes (like Venezuela) but one doesn't need to get that far from the UK to find another country governed by socialists and progressives whose awful (in fact nonexistent) strategy has brought an even worse deaths per million than the UK: Spain.

They basically wanted so much to have a feminist rally for March 8 that they took no measures whatsoever until March 9. This went to the extent that in February 25 the Spanish Health Ministry told people arriving from hotspots like China and Lombardy that they didn't need to worry and take no additional measures if they didn't show any symptoms:



Because, of course, getting their people to march on the streets was obviously the top priority!

Hopefully this will end populism for good, although the UK has populists across the board.

[Patrickov]

Imagine an alternative reality in which instead of Boris winning the last election with a landslide, it was Momentum and their Dear Leader Corbyn who have won instead... Then just a little while later this once in a century pandemic happens and instead of a nice jovial human being at the helm telling us we have to stay indoors we have a bitter and twisted ideologist like Corbyn who hates british people ordering us all under house arrest..

The country would go nuts.

Is it not the case that the very possibility that an emergency situation like a World War or a pandemic can just come out of nowhere without any forewarning mean it is never safe to vote for socialists?

I fail to see any logic here. At least there's no practical difference between "telling people to stay indoors" and "ordering everyone under house arrest" in this case. The apparent severity of the "house arrest" will probably be "tamed" enough to fit most, if not all, situations now.

So I think the above deduction is a stretch with no apparent purpose other than smearing Corbyn or "socialists".

For Corbyn's case, he has fallen and probably has no chance of coming back. If I am his enemy, I already have my job done well and sound. Give him a break.

I oppose socialism because it is very easy to descend into totalitarianism, which is worse than capitalism and enlightened Western Imperialism. Also, Socialist members on PoFo often display support of totalitarian countries like China and Cuba, which is the primary reason that I find them incorrigible and should at least be trumped. On the other hand, I do not find current Western socialist leaders particularly hateful. They might be mistaken but many of them are more honourable than their supporters.

[Atlantis]

@wat0n, Spain isn't a socialist country, it just happens to have a very weak government led by a social democrat at this moment.

Spain is a freak event. It doesn't prove anything about the merits or demerits of socialist rule. If anything, Spain is the results of its dictatorial history, which has created a high barrier to restricting personal freedoms. That explains the reluctance to prohibit mass events or to issue travel warnings. The same applies to Germany.

What I'm saying is obvious: populists both left and right are not capable of managing a crisis because their simplistic solutions fueled by populist sentiments and demagogues have nothing to do with a science-based differentiated approach to the crisis.

Is Corbyn a populist? Perhaps to a degree but that's very different from the populism of the Brexit spin masters.

[SolarCross]

A populist = someone the electorate would like to elect

An elitist = a detestable prig that quite rightfully can not win an election without massive cheating

[Atlantis]

A populist = someone the electorate would like to elect

An elitist = a detestable prig that quite rightfully can not win an election without massive cheating

That's very naive.

A populist is somebody who managed to manipulate public opinion by deceit and by rousing base sentiments such as xenophobia in the population. Even if you take the view that people of foreign origin are expendable, the effect of populism is generally divisive and can lead to social disintegration since it does not leave room for compromise, which is at the root of all democratic processes.

Let's not beat about the bush, today's right wing populism springs from the same source as fascism in the last century, even if it has changed it's clothes.

[SolarCross]

That's very naive.

A populist is somebody who managed to manipulate public opinion by deceit and by rousing base sentiments such as xenophobia in the population. Even if you take the view that people of foreign origin are expendable, the effect of populism is generally divisive and can lead to social disintegration since it does not leave room for compromise, which is at the root of all democratic processes.

Let's not beat about the bush, today's right wing populism springs from the same source as fascism in the last century, even if it has changed it's clothes.

No, you are being condescending, which is a classic symptom of elitist pretentiousness particularly when it is unearned.

A populist is someone who speaks what the crowd wants. However not everyone thinks the same way, some people are loyalists and some are traitors, so of course anyone who speaks to a crowd is going to be opposite to what another crowd wants. That is your "divisive" and it is inevitable on any subject. Pick any policy position, "more taxes for more benies"? The half of the country over the average income would be nuts to vote for that but equally anyone under probably should vote for it. Consensus on anything that matters is impossible, so we have elections instead. Sore losers cry "populist" but they really just mean popular.

[Rich]

A populist is somebody who managed to manipulate public opinion by deceit and by rousing base sentiments

And how exactly does that differ from a normal politician? All politicians use deceit and all try and play to the same basic human emotions.

[Atlantis]

And how exactly does that differ from a normal politician? All politicians use deceit and all try and play to the same basic human emotions.

You must live in a strange world. The politicians I know actively fight racism and make efforts to integrate citizens of foreign origin into society. To do anything else is to promote social disintegration.

I'm sure that even in the UK politicians are not as cynical as you are.

@SolarCross, populists are a strange breed. They keep on ranting about the so-called elite, yet they don't mind being manipulated by the oligarchs and their lobby groups against their own interests.

[wat0n]

@wat0n, Spain isn't a socialist country, it just happens to have a very weak government led by a social democrat at this moment.

Spain is a freak event. It doesn't prove anything about the merits or demerits of socialist rule. If anything, Spain is the results of its dictatorial history, which has created a high barrier to restricting personal freedoms. That explains the reluctance to prohibit mass events or to issue travel warnings. The same applies to Germany.

What I'm saying is obvious: populists both left and right are not capable of managing a crisis because their simplistic solutions fueled by populist sentiments and demagogues have nothing to do with a science-based differentiated approach to the crisis.

Is Corbyn a populist? Perhaps to a degree but that's very different from the populism of the Brexit spin masters.

No, and if Corbyn had been elected in the UK it wouldn't be either -at least not like the dictatorships like Vietnam or Venezuela. So in that sense it's actually a lot closer to the kind of government Corbyn would have led.

Spain didn't take long to act because of a "history of dictatorship". Neighboring Portugal acted quickly to stop the virus and the results have (of course) been radically different, even though its own military regime ended just a year before Franco died and Portugal is poorer than Spain. It also doesn't explain why did Spain take measures just right on March 9, the idea that they didn't do so before to get as many people on the streets for March 8 makes a lot more sense in that regard.

And of course the corbynistas are populists. Of the leftist Latin American kind, actually, and would be quite successful in that part of the world. Boris Johnson is also a populist, but more in tune with those one can see in the Anglosphere (so is Trump), which is why he won to begin with.

[fokker]

What I'm saying is obvious: populists both left and right are not capable of managing a crisis because their simplistic solutions fueled by populist sentiments and demagogues have nothing to do with a science-based differentiated approach to the crisis.

This statement doesn't hold in the eastern EU. Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia all have basically populist governments. They all managed the crisis exceptionally well, human loss is minimal and spread of virus is slowing down. It turned out if correct measures are employed, there is no need to panic like some members on this forum do. In this region the pandemic has been nowhere near as deadly as predicted. Economic downturn will be caused mainly by low market demand from western EU due to being hit harder.

[Atlantis]

Spain didn't take long to act because of a "history of dictatorship". Neighboring Portugal acted quickly to stop the virus and the results have (of course) been radically different, even though its own military regime ended just a year before Franco died and Portugal is poorer than Spain.

Portugal was just lucky because, at the periphery of the continent, it was hit later than others. By the time infections started to be imported from Spain and Italy, it was already clear what was happening and the virus could have been stopped, if the authorities had acted in time. Portugal has far more cases than it should have. The health system is very weak and would be overwhelmed at a fraction of the Italian outbreak. At least it looks like they are making an effort now by scaling up testing.

If there is a socialist country in Europe, it is Portugal and no Spain.

Both Portugal and Spain are influenced in their response by their totalitarian past. In Portugal, that takes the form of a legalistic attitude which, for example, led some to absurd discussions about the alleged unconstitutional quarantining of Wuhan returnees.

Better not make bold statements about what you obviously don't understand