You must live somewhere without mandates.

To be fair, I think it's less about control than about naked populism- vaccine mandates, and many other covid measures are wildly popular. It's basically mob rule. Liberal democracy is supposed to have built in protections for this, but when they get ignored, all bets are off. Right wing populists ignoring liberal democratic norms was the big fear a few years ago, and now it has swung far to the left.

There is some element of control as you say, but I think it's more in the "show you're a member of our religion" sense than in the government or corporate control sense. This is a war people are waging on themselves.

Who is in charge of our governments and corporations? If it's comprised of the people attempting to make it about their religious zeal on this subject, then I consider that no different than it being a government or corporation ploy for more power.

Because at the end of the day, it's the biggest stakeholders in a corporation that will love the power to force people out of having bread if they don't comply with increasingly invasive protocols.

If that's the case, it's even worse than a power grab.

What's the quote about abusive power done on behalf of the abused, and not ever having a reason to stop?

> Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever?

It's way worse than a power grab. People always are more comfortable believing there is some "other" that is responsible for evil, and all we have to do is defeat them. There isn't, it's us

Just two quick thoughts. First, the 60-70% went out the window with Delta. Second, Australia has a well-documented history of being an unusually heavy-handed democracy.

If you don't take the most repressive Western regime as your starting point, you may find a much more measured variation of responses, and most of those measures have now been abandoned. The last I checked, proponents of authoritarianism don't usually just drop their repressive policies, yet that is the crystal clear pattern we observe throughout the developed world.

You just proved I'm right. In your other comment, you said "is 6 more months fine?"

And I said that they'll always find reasons to extend their magical new powers. And yet here we are, someone doing that for them by buying into the strain fear-mongering DESPITE the fact that the antibodies from past covid or from vaccination are effective against Delta. Source again:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-27/previous-...

And with both populations having antibodies (from any source) in large excess of Fauci's 60-70 percent estimate, pegged as of May 2021 at over 80% of the population...it's time to end the mandates. Source again:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25398704...

I'm not going to mince words over which Western European country may be more polite than Australia as if that detracts from my arguments about what's happening. Australia is turning into a dictatorship at this rate. That is not hyperbole. Look at the links I shared more closely. This is in a western democracy, and we have no shortage of "useful fools" who will gladly parrot the same rhetoric in America or Canada or Europe if they can.

The political rhetoric coming out of Australia and New Zealand could be written by any authoritarian government any time in history.

There is a possibility it will get worse, unless the people of Australia and New Zealand choose to be very brave. Non-violence across the board, but there needs to be a massive outpouring before it's too late. Before the authorities just bribe the college students with free stuff - students don't have a long enough memory to see the risks of what is happening. Therefore the adults and the parents will need to be very brave and stand against the rhetoric.

The way the mass media tries to pit "unvaxxed vs vaxxed" and tries to label the unvaxxed is so dishonest, and it will prime inexperienced minds (who are already overly-zealous due to programming and doom-scrolling) to just go with whatever the State says. History does not bode well if this happens.