Also, how does protesting COVID mandates make someone "racist and misogynist?" Is he just saying that because they're truckers?
Uhh, I think calling for the overthrowing of the federal government[0] is a little more than just protesting a covid mandate lol. To be clear, I'm not saying overthrowing the federal gov't is racist or misogynist. I'm just saying that clearly there is a lot more going on than that
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/28/canada-trucker...
Overthrow the government in this case means publicly and commit to repealing mandates, and set up a citizen group to review policy.
Similar requests of governments happen every year in western countries. There are citizen oversight groups set up for failing school districts, police departments, and the environment.
None of these Re overthrowing the government
This is literally their demand
This isn't radical. Organized protests for hundreds of years have demanded public written concession. This is the norm and what organized protest looks like
That's creating an alternative government
If my city sets up a school board, that isn't a replacement government or above the power of the government.
Governments delegate power to panels and empowers them to make decisions on their behalf every day.
Asking a government to set up a group to make decisions is not Revolution
> SCGGC will effective as of midnight on this ___, day of ___________, 2021,instruct all levels of the Federal, Provincial, Territorial, and Municipal governments to re-instate all employees in all branches of governments and, not limited to promote the same to the private industry and institutional sectors employees with full lawful employment rights prior to the wrongful and unlawful dismissals that stem from the SARS-CoV-2 (and not limited to SARS-CoV-2 subsequent variations) vaccine passport mandates
Not only do they want full control of all levels of government, but they also want to be able to tell all private companies that they need to rehire people fired
The SCGGC is the currently existing and only government of Canada. CU (the protesters) are asking it to use its powers to do something.
In your quote, they are asking the SCGGC to use its power to stop and reverse all SARS-CoV-2 firings.
They are also asking to SCGGC to agree to set up a committee (CCC) with no powers that will be used to share schedules for the covid policy reversal and issue joint statements about the mandates lifting
I mean, in terms of legalese, they actually made a reasonable pass at scoping it down. Literally the only verbatim goal there is to reverse what was seen as overreach.
Just because it's a wide reach doesn't mean grasping for full unilateral ongoing control.
Not all violations of free speech are literally police sending someone to jail for saying something. If the politicians pressure private organizations to censor speech, resulting in the speech being censored, then its absolutely a violation of free speech
Take away their toys and let them hold a protest with their boots and parkas.
It feels really bad to have comments removed for keywords like PoC when it's coming from your own tax dollars.
To which I say:
A. I bet more than 15% are unvaccinated because why answer honestly with Canada’s level of restrictions and penalties?
B. If it is actually 15%, that’s not fringe, and also that’s low enough that dropping the mandate should be reasonable (see all the countries who dropped restrictions at 75%-80% vaccination).
From a numbers perspective, 91.54% of Canadians 18+ have received at least one dose. 88.91% of 18+ have received two.
It's /possible/ that truckers are widely unvaccinated (perhaps they all subscribe to the same train of thought), but it's unlikely.
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." — Thomas Paine, Dissertation on First Principles of Government (1791)
Past explanations on this:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Similarly, your employer can fire you if there is no reasonable accommodation for your medical condition that you are willing to accept. If, for example, you have a treatable form of schizophrenia but refuse all medication, you can get fired if that condition renders you unable to perform your job duties.
You can get committed to an institution, or your employer can be forced to reinstate you, but absent such an order from the legal system, you are free to refuse treatment, and your employer is free to let you go.
You can't quit the game. I assure you. Might as well make the stand here and now, because in the end, it will find it's way back to you. People problems always do.
even if involuntarily committed to a mental institution?
Most states define laws of their own around this, and usually a longer involuntary stay requires a court hearing. But I wouldn’t be surprised if even those are operating in a legal gray area that would get shot down upon a SCOTUS hearing. More realistically, the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear these cases due to higher priorities, but I think the “right to liberty” has only very few exceptions.
If you are vaccinated, you are done with the pandemic. Morally, ethically, and practically. You should be allowed to return to actual, pre-pandemic normal. End of story.
If enough people still get sick at once there could still be a collapse in a local health system due to overloading.
Given the uncertainty with new variations of COVID isn't it better to err on the side of caution and try to protect both the health systems and as many people at once?
1. Will the mandate increase vaccine uptake?
2. Will the mandate prevent overloading hospitals and clinics?
3. Are the health benefits for others proportionate to the risks for vaccinated?
4. Are less restrictive policies available that can achieve similar outcomes?
The UK decided to go with without vaccine mandates. They even revoked them for healthcare workers because with omicron variant they no longer made sense.
I am not saying what Canada should do, but at this moment vaccine mandates don't really seem worth to truckers, if not for all people.
What if you have children who are not yet eligible for the vaccine?
"Covid-19 has killed 280 children under 18 from January through September 2021, the time span in which the alpha and delta variants were active. Flu and pneumonia, heart disease, drowning, guns, and motor vehicles were all deadlier to children during the same time periods annually from 2015 to 2019 (the latest years with available data)[0]."
[0]: https://www.vox.com/22699019/covid-19-children-kids-risk-hos...
From what we are seeing the vaccine side effects are similar but considerably milder and short term, the virus sometimes has long term negative effects (lung capacity, fatigue, weakness, inability to concentrate…)
It makes no sense, but the amount of people who conflate the two is shockingly high. I guess strawmans are easier to argue against than someone who holds nuanced views.
edit: one such example of someone who conflates the two https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30225017
A couple examples (but there are more):
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52993306
https://www.dailywire.com/news/merriam-webster-suddenly-alte...
LGBT people objected to sexual preference since the 1980s at least.[1]
[1] https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1986-07-23-860223...
Surely you jest. Polls are anonymous. And even if the security is bad, nobody is scrutinizing IP logs of poll respondents. Maybe in Kazakhstan or something, but freedom in the West has not fallen that far.
People do lie on polls, of course, but it's usually about self-expression, not self-protection. I'd imagine that vaccinated truckers are more likely to report antagonism to vaccine mandates by lying about being unvaccinated vs. the reverse.
I bet the numbers for that poll would be way lower than the real statistics.
People don’t answer honestly on polls if they feel there is any way (even a perception) that this could come back and hurt them.
The state sponsored ones?
At this point I don't think it's only about the vaccines.
The GFM action is also quite dehumanizing. It's a statement from a large donation platform (with all the associated feelings of righteousness) about the value of the protest.
I'm not really sure GFM is the problem though. I think the fear of the media might be forcing their hand. The consequences for keeping this fundraiser open would have hurt them somehow. Same with the consequences for shutting down a BLM fundraiser. Same consequence from the same source.
That's probably because of the Nazi and Confederate flags people are waving.
In my opinion, they should cry it out or quit given Canada's 1 dose vaccination rate is in the 80% range.
Screams of an orchestrated heuristic.
If you’re aware of such a fringe factoid as flags appearing in the crowd but simultaneously unaware of the footage demonstrating these to be literally false flags you may want to diversify your information sources.
> He didn't. This is absurd.
https://twitter.com/JustinTrudeau/status/1488660359422648320...
He did. Also said it a bunch of times in person.
If someone denounces looting at a BLM protest -- also something that happened -- does that mean every BLM protester is a looter? That is absurd.
Of course not. Just like the presence of extremists at a rally doesn't mean everyone's an extremist. If you've followed Trudeau at all through these events, he's constantly painted all protesters as extremists...
https://maybury.ca/the-reformed-physicist/2022/02/03/a-night...
And I'm not on the truckers' side per se... But the response from the government has been shocking and I'm sure as hell not on the government's side.
For the record, I'm vaccinated. Not an anti-vaxxer. Literally just went to Europe and came back. Getting out of and back into Canada was the most onerous part of the trip.
So if you can't prove vaccination on entry, you need to have a proof of negative test and quarantine a few days.
I just want to point that out, because it seems the media has taken to make it sound like the Canadian government wants to force vaccinations on truckers, it doesn't, but it's enforcing safety measures around border entry, and depending on your vaccination status, those measures are possibly more inconvenient.
The other thing I want to bring up is that in Canada, the government, and I'm turn the tax payers, they subsidize and pay for medical treatment of people who have COVID and need treatment.
So it makes more sense that you'd want to make sure people take necessary preventative measures, otherwise you're having tax payers pay the bill.
Some people in Canada are even suggesting that instead of such preventative measures, if people want to be allowed to take their own risk, then the treatment for COVID for individuals that didn't take preventative precautions shouldn't be offered to them for free and shouldn't be prioritized over other medical interventions. But this is pretty extreme as well, and while reasonable, Canadians don't really want to just let someone in need of medical treatment to not be able to get it. So the general sentiment is that you'd rather make sure everyone is taking necessary precautions and cover people who need treatment no matter what. But as people push back on precautions, the idea to be stricter on who gets access to subsidized treatment will probably become more and more popular, especially with regards to vaccination status.
People whose job requires international travel have always been expected to keep up to date regulations. Truckers were just an exception.
You aren't even getting the argument right. They are protesting mandates. I can be pro-sterilization but anti forced-sterilization. There is a big difference. Enough to drive a few trucks through.
Suppose next year, the government mandate that you lose weight, or stop smoking or run everyday, all that of course for the "greater good". And then the year after that, it requires that you give pills to your children because that makes them "less indisciplined" and so on and so forth.
Stop being so certain and think a little bit. By accepting this mandate we're not only accepting this jab, we're accepting all the future crazy ideas that the government will come with.
The idea that we should be against common-sense measures to promote herd immunity during a very real pandemic because "the government will make you stop smoking" is frankly an outrageously claim.
It's long been held, since at least America began, that herd immunity is vital to the success and security of a nation. Our militaries require these vaccinations because a fighting force must be healthy. Our schools require these vaccines because sick kids and sick cities don't learn.
The idea that a vaccine mandate is anything more than a century-old, bog-standard, completely required part of the human war against disease is a radical and anti-civilized position. Herd immunity is non-negotiable for our level of modern society to exist.
I swear, we are killing ourselves. Dense civilization requires trade offs, and in the war against pandemic disease, that does include vaccination.
This claim is mostly overblown at this point. It was a legitimate concern early on, but it hasn't been true for some time.
The vaccine claims are also misleading. Herd immunity by vaccination is not the only way to protect society, and the distinct lack of discussion or recognition of immunity from infection is conspicuous. COVID's infection fatality rate for certain cohorts is low enough that vaccination isn't strictly needed, and arguably taking a different tack on this could potentially have saved far more lives.
For instance, consider if we had only isolated and vaccinated those at greatest risk of death and complications from COVID (40 and older, immunocompromised, comorbidities), and then shipped the remaining vaccine supply to the third world to suppress the emergence of variants. We might not have had Delta or Omicron at all. It's not at all clear that this would not have saved more people in the long run.
Beating this vaccine mandate drum is blinding people to other rational solutions. It's not going to end well. This convoy is probably only the beginning.
Herd immunity by vaccination is the only way to protect society without requiring infection, which fills hospitals and leads to deaths. Vaccination means you're about 40x less likely to be hospitalized or die, which saves our health system. Do you honestly believe there should be more discussion of infection immunity as a solution, when it results in 40X more hospitalization and death? I've seen anti-vaxxers call public health officials "genociders" for decisions far less death-causing than that.
If you think the vaccine mandate is why this convoy happened, instead of conservative fake news creating vast conspiracy theories from the "NWO" to "Q-ANON", funded by conservatives billionaires and the governments of multiple countries, to help destabilize and bring down the west, then to each their own. But how many Americans are among them? How many fans do they have abroad? It's not about Canadian mandates, it's about the global right wing conspiracy movement.
But I do not believe that the vaccine anti-mandate stuff is anything more than todays convenient whip for the very powerful forces of conservative media control to use to continue their war after Trump lost. Just another issue politicized for convenience, as until conservative media flipped the switch, vaccine hesitancy was almost entirely left-wing. Even in America anti-vaccination attitudes on the right did not start until post-election and post-vaccine rollout, and there's a large group of vaccinated conservatives who regret it because now it's seen as a mistake in that ideology.
https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations
Furthermore, unvaccinated people are occupying fewer beds than vaccinated people in terms of numbers. Even if they all got vaccinated, we'd be basically in exactly the same place, so how do you expect vaccine mandates to help here?
In any case, I think it's clear that the claim I responded to that "hundreds of thousands of people dropping dead that normally wouldn't" is overblown regardless of these numbers. The people dying are mostly the elderly and the sickly, which are exactly the people who we would in fact expect to die suddenly, and healthy people would not be dropping dead in those numbers even if the ICUs were overflowing.
Notice how smoking has long been regulated and limited, but not banned? That slippery slope argument doesn't work either.
And the bit about giving kids pills is paranoid nonsense. And ironically, kids have had required vaccines for a very long time. With no sliding down any slopes.
No we're not. Accepting mandates doesn't somehow force everyone to automatically accept anything any politician claims or does in the future. That's not how anything works.
That's how everything works, it's called a precedent.
You're conflating mandates for which there are precedents with completely novel and exotic government actions.
You specifically called out the government making you quit smoking or forcing you to eat better in your original post.
And it's you who mentionned "completely novel and exotic government actions", to which I point out that it's already happened with lockdowns.
There's nothing in history that resemble what has happened in those last 2 years, whether you agree or not won't change that fact.
There was a similar situation with mandatory masks, and then loud anti-mask protests which resulted in the lifting of some mask mandates.
What happened over the past two years has happened before, and will probably happen again. You can find examples of lockdowns in other pandemic eras. Venice partially locked down in 1575 due to the plague.
You may disagree with lockdowns, but there's plenty of precedent. Your "fact" is incorrect.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/how-citie...
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/breaking-poin...
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/historical-precedents-lock...
A lockdown at such a scale never happened before covid. Your "counter-fact" is incorrect.
I don't feel like you're engaging in good faith, so I'm going to go ahead and quit responding.
Because it's been the justification from day 1: "not overwhelm hospitals".
It's justification for the sake of allaying that commentator's fears. Most people that support the mandate support it because it makes sense and they've thought about it. In fact, I'd wager that those who are against the mandate are more often susceptible to being brainwashed than those who are enthusiastically for it
Interesting theory.
Canadian news and politicians are desperately trying to denounce the protesters while ignoring the fact that Canada has some of the harshest Covid restrictions in the world at the moment, while the US has hardly any and European nations are mostly moving to remove all restrictions.