COVID-19 is the terrorism of this generation. It's the anything goes, doesn't matter how fair, as long as it's because COVID.
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It’s badly affected air travel and who knows what changes will result (or what contracts for pointless bio-security theatre have been made)
In the UK, a 300+ page law was basically pre-written and enacted very quickly, reminiscent of the early anti terrorism law.
We have set up a bio security unit, currently headed by the security services.
UK has a “threat level” system for coronavirus similar to the terror threat level.
The government talk about it in threatening terms such as it being everywhere and it not going away.
If you are against measures you can easily be accused of wanting old people to die.
The UK was absolutely petrified of it at the beginning shown by the very successful self policed lockdown.
Definitely some similarities
I said "reminiscent", i.e it invokes memories. Hastily enacted, a blunt instrument, huge, sweeping changes to legislation, makes human rights organisations nervous etc.
What does that mean in the UK context specifically ... for example, the COVID law repeals a reform that was made some years ago, after police finally caught the most prolific serial killer in history. He is believed to have killed perhaps 250 people without being caught, because he was a doctor who was forging death certificates. So the rules were changed to require multiple sign-offs on the cause of death, because multiple signoffs on cremation forms were the only way he was originally detected.
In the COVID panic that rule has been removed. Doctors can now put any cause of death they want without anyone checking them. In many countries there are now widespread reports of elderly relatives being assigned COVID as a cause of death in care homes, when the family members know they repeatedly tested negative and weren't sick.
Even better, the rule that said multiple psychiatry opinions are required to involuntarily commit someone was also repealed. In other words the government anticipated their policies would lead to both mass mental breakdown and civil disobedience; allowing a single doctor to effectively imprison someone indefinitely without any trial or any checks/balances at all, looks like a rather neat solution to that, doesn't it?
All these changes are in a sense well intentioned, the lawmakers believed speed is more important than accuracy. Those beliefs are wrong.
Just as the implication isn't that the PATRIOT act authors did 9/11, they certainly took the momentum of the aftermath of a tragedy to push their pre-existing agenda.
No, there's plenty of public evidence that lockdowns reduce the spread of COVID-19 and save lives; that's not true for the PATRIOT Act. So this is false, as well as being a red herring...
> Many people here agreed with that for years until Snowden etc revealed that it was unjustified.
I don't think that Snowden and other whistleblowers revealed that the PATRIOT Act was unjustified so much as that what was actually authorized by the PATRIOT Act was a drop in the bucket to what the US government was actually doing in surveillance.
The proximate result of which was Congress expanding surveillance authority to legalize much of what had been being done illegally (authority it is currently in the process of renewing), so clearly it's not even a universal conclusion, even now, that the unauthorized surveillance they revealed was unjustified.