Posted on 11/27/2021 1:24:33 PM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
… As New Zealand shifts to a policy of “living with the virus,” residents accustomed to living virtually Covid-free for most of the pandemic are being confronted by rising case numbers and widening vaccine mandates. Opposition to vaccination as well as frustration with ongoing pandemic restrictions is fueling a small but vocal protest movement inspired in part by American politics.
In a working paper published in November, a team of researchers in New Zealand said there had been a “sharp increase in the popularity and intensity” of disinformation around Covid-19 since August.
The researchers said the disinformation was “being used as a kind of Trojan horse” to coax New Zealanders from vaccine hesitancy to vaccine resistance, and then to the embrace of far-right ideologies like white supremacy and extreme misogyny. Some of the most extreme content, they said, comes from overseas, particularly Australia and the United States.
At anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine protests in cities like Wellington and Christchurch, “Make America Great Again” hats and flags from the QAnon conspiracy theory movement are visible among the crowds. Sam Brett, a student at the University of Canterbury who attended recent protests for his doctoral research, said they felt like a “miniature, New Zealand version of a Trump rally.”
The protests often feature “powerful, charismatic speakers,” Brett said, who cast the government as “maliciously trying to take away people’s rights.”
Paul Buchanan, an Auckland-based security analyst and former consultant to U.S. intelligence services, said he was concerned by the “importation of U.S.-style populist rhetoric” into New Zealand’s anti-vaccination movement, characterizing it as “tinged with violence and vulgar, dehumanizing disrespect for political and social opponents.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
So you're still relying on politicians to protect you? Yeah - that doesn't match all the rhetoric I've heard over the years from Americans about free you are compared to everybody else.
Don't get me wrong - I don't think we're better. I just don't think we're worse either. I think most people are fundamentally apathetic.
I do work to try and solve problems here - but I do it through legal, constitutional, means. It's not glamorous or dramatic - but I'll always try that first before resorting to other approaches.
And I assume there are a lot of people in the US doing the same thing there.
I just get a bit annoyed when I get told we're doing nothing, just because we're not rioting in the streets. In the final analysis, yes, you may need armed revolution. If all else fails.
But I don't think we're there yet in Australia and I think we are going to succeed before we get to that stage.
I can't speak for the US. But I would hope a nation that has been a beacon for freedom and democracy across the world for a long time is capable of getting its act together and I hope has.
I don’t expect to see any such developments unless this regime over-reaches beyond tolerable limits
Same here, more or less. But I've seen a lot of people on FR trying to tell Australian's we should already be at that stage. We haven't reached those limits yet. We haven't even come up to our final constitutional protections that do exist. We're closer to that stage than at any point since 1975, but we're not there yet.
There’s also concern about government corruption, refusals to disclose information under freedom of information laws, police corruption, overly politicised court systems...
There. I fixed it.
Maybe if NZ didn’t have a nasty beeyotch with 64 teeth in her smile locking down the entire country over a handful of cases and marginalizing unvaccinated people, parts of it wouldn’t be turning into Q-Anon, MAGA country.
THIS. (as we say up here; basically means that you nailed it.)
What we have is a lot of conspiracy theories and “identity politics” that seem to have the goal of dividing the public and sowing mistrust. What I’m noticing is that we are operating in this miasma of disinformation and something that feels a bit like I imagine a psyops campaign would feel.
Now while all of this is distracting people, we have a great deal of change happening with privacy eroding at an alarming rate, a huge disruption going on in the workplace, an open Southern border, and a Congress/Senate that is hopelessly behind the times on digital security, among many other issues. The parties have been so divided that any attempt in DC to cooperate enough to get much of anything done since before the housing bubble popped fails (2006?), so yeah, whats broke stays broke, and here we are…
Trump tried to break the logjam and get us moving again in a non-stupid direction, and without a doubt he got the worst of whatever this is. The FBI named the campaign they pulled on him “Crossfire-Hurricane,” like a line from the song “Jumping Jack Flash.
So yeah, we have a fight on our hands, but at the moment we can only guess who the other players are, and shooting while blindfolded is not a way to clarify the situation.
I would humbly ask that your state premiers follow the example of my governor, Ron DeSantis of our state of Florida, and let their citizens be free!
Australia’s constitution was written by the state governments (still referred to as colonial governments back then - but largely self governing and independent from British control on all but a few issues) and they kept a lot of power for themselves - the federal government was only given power over specific areas - and it still works that way. The critical one over the last two years has been ‘public health’ - that is virtually entirely under the control of the state governments and the federal government only has a very limited power to intervene. That’s allowed the Victorian government, in particular, to basically impose extreme restrictions that the federal government can’t do anything about, and protections that do exist in federal law to protect people’s rights, don’t generally apply to state government actions. Some other states have gone further than I think appropriate as well, but 90% of the problems and the worst problems have been Victoria.
Honestly, at this point, we are pretty free again. Most of the crap is over - whether it’s going to come back remains to be seen, but I doubt it, unless we do get some sort of major issue like a dangerous new vaccine resistant variant - and even then I think it’s much less likely now.
“What we have is a lot of conspiracy theories and “identity politics” that seem to have the goal of dividing the public and sowing mistrust. What I’m noticing is that we are operating in this miasma of disinformation and something that feels a bit like I imagine a psyops campaign would feel.”
*****
It’s like two opposing sides put “pandemic” in their war-gaming computers and used artificial intelligence to map out the steps and stages to get to a desired political and cultural outcome.
We feel like rudderless ships getting buffeted about the ocean due to their constant pushing and pulling to get things back on or further down their planned track.
Things we see in the news don’t make sense because the real game is hidden from us, and we are constantly feed a diet of pablum, spin and lies.
I certainly hope it doesn’t come back. If I may say so, your premier was a real hardcase.
Yep. It is rather too obvious, isn’t it? It has all the trigger words to send Liberals into the arms of the vaccine.
Very true.
I’m also noticing that the cultural issues we are being pitted against each other on can only result in a ton of regulation of individuals (whichever side wins doesn’t effect this outcome).
Would NBC News be lying to us? Again?
Oh, yes. Daniel Andrews is a nasty piece of work in so many ways.
I hear that #1 business in NZ is raising sheep.
For the sake of clarity, my comments are somewhat removed from the reality of the situation because I’m across the border in Canada where an armed resistance to globalism is probably not even something within the realms of possibility given the lack of opposition combined with the scarcity of arms. I am just commenting on what I think is happening in the USA but I could easily be far removed from an accurate assessment, for all I know armed resistance is right around the corner. I don’t think it is, but my observations are more theoretical than empirical.
As to where things are at in Australia, it seems a bit worse there than here, but only a matter of degrees, and some of the same tendencies can be seen among our political elites. I think they are moving a bit more cautiously because they aren’t sure how much support they have among police and armed forces who would have to enforce anything stricter than what they have actually proposed so far.
I don’t mean to imply that people are waiting for a political leader to come along and organize what they themselves should be organizing; it is more a question of whose organization would be widely recognized as legitimate. Just because one group of patriots in location A decide this is the time to move, will not guarantee that patriots in location B would automatically agree, or wish to join in, simply because anyone can call themselves by any name and there would be no shortage of opportunities for disinformation, to sweep up dissidents in an operation designed specifically for that purpose.
That is probably the reason why most sensible people would wait for the time when recognizable political leadership arose, so that there was less danger of being cut off before anything meaningful had been achieved. Also you have to ask what is the end game, let’s say a group of patriots wanted to oppose the regime, then what’s their alternative, what are they going out to fight for? If they say “to restore Trump to the presidency” then look at the monumental size of that task, and even so, Trump himself has chosen to withdraw from that whole field of battle to devote himself to a renewed political battle instead. I think a lot of people right now might prefer to see a more direct approach, at least a secession or partition movement, but there is enough respect for Trump that people are willing to put the decision essentially in his hands.
I would say that in theory this is probably not a good idea. It is an ongoing weakness in the anti-globalist position that there is no organized political response, it is very much ad hoc, wait and see, leave it to one man. That one man may be quite admirable but also mortal, what if the weakness inherent in old age overtakes him? What if he’s just wrong, despite the best of intentions? What if we have no better option than secession or some other response?
If we don’t all have a say in some political process, and instead leave it to one person to decide, then we are stuck with whatever goes along with that, for better or worse.
Thanks for sharing your conspiracy theory with me. When I see COVID doing even a quarter of the damage to our economy that our government’s totalitarian impulses have, and posing a quarter of the threat to our lives and liberty, I’ll take your conspiracy theory a little more seriously.
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