Your Papers Please!

The graphic is not too far from the reality in Hong Kong, which is suffering draconian social control in the guise of preventing widespread Wuhan flu infection.

And in this country, primarily in the blue states we have armies of Karen's ruthlessly enforcing offensive "emergency" regulations designed to control our behavior for the same amorphous goal...controlling a viral disease that is probably ubiquitous and empirically with about the same mortality and morbidity as a bad seasonal flu. And more disturbing, much less dangerous than other diseases that are allowed to run rampant in our country. Think back to the 1980s, when AIDS was uncontrollable, but the powers-that-be, in particular Anthony Fauci, refused to use proven public health methods to isolate carriers of the disease, and in fact allowed them to infect the nation's blood supply, which condemned to death thousands of hemophiliacs.

So spare me the tired and easily refuted claim that our current situation is simply a scientific response to a dangerous disease. Similar responses to dangerous situations would never be accepted, and would trigger immediate and appropriate legal responses. Just imagine if Fredo The Elder (Andrew Cuomo) announced that until the murder rate in the worst precincts in NYC dropped to the background level of the rest of the country, all people above a certain age were subject to search for weapons. Or that policemen would be posted in every supermarket to search all morbidly overweight people for prohibited foods.

Those are ridiculous and unacceptable examples of government overreach, yet we are currently tolerating similar insults to our rights, and looming on the horizon are even more insidious measures. Vaccine passports, segregation of the vaccinated from the unvaccinated, and many more degradations of our rights as free people are coming, and soon.

How different is a vaccine passport compared to the yellow star of Nazi Germany, or a letter from the Red Guards allowing travel to the cities, or an ID card allowing one entrance into a communist party food store in Moscow?

The advent of incredibly fast computers, completely interconnected, and vast databases that can be accessed from literally anywhere with a cellular connection makes the Nazis and the Soviets and the Chinese communists mere dilettantes compared to the current surveillance state.

Papers could be forged...badges could be manufactured...the authorities could be evaded (at least for a time). But how many of us have the technical knowledge and skills to evade a vaccine passport requirement? Or avoid being tracked with our cell phones and internet log-ons and electronic toll systems and credit cards and facial recognition systems and license plate readers and on and on and on.

We are in the midst of a profound shift to authoritarian rule, but this time the tools available to those in power are orders of magnitude more powerful than even the infamous East German Ministry For State Security had!

The dystopian novels of the past predicted exactly this, but they were warnings...and we ignored them.

posted by CBD at 12:00 PM

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