"Right now I'd look at Sweden or Hungary or Poland as countries that have resisted the globalist authoritarian push better than others. Sweden has done better in resisting Covid mandates.""
My oldest daughter lives in Sweden. It is genuinely Socialist. Cradle to grave social welfare (my daughter gets paid to study at university there - student debt is not a concept), strict gun laws, very high taxes. I don't think you'd like it there. Pretty place, though. I'm heading back in October.
"you shouldn't judge the whole country by that, other areas such as Western Australia and Tasmania, are not as fanatical in their Covid containment measures."
Here in Western Australia, we were very restrictive in our Covid measures. You needed a very, very compelling reason to enter the State. As a result, over a period of maybe two years, we had a handful of Covid community
transmissions, no deaths. The purpose of doing that was twofold: our mining and energy sector would not have coped (you can't turn off an aluminium smelter of the scale and size that it is in Kwinana, and only so many bulk iron ore carriers can sit in the ocean off the coast of Karratha. I should note for context that China, Korea and Japan import most of the raw materials for their consumer products from Western Australia, which is the size of Western Europe and unlike Western Europe largely underdeveloped), and second, we have highly vulnerable remote indigenous communities who might have been wiped out by Delta).
I have never heard of anyone being imprisoned. We had extended quarantine for inbound visitors and returning citizens, locked up in hotel rooms for two weeks before being allowed to go into the community.... Oh! Actually we did imprison some people. Two guys from Melbourne got false identification to purport that they were from the Northern Territory, during a time when people from Victoria were pretty much barred from entering WA as the Delta variant was rampant in Melbourne. They wanted to see their AFL team play in the grand final, and afterwards mingled with the club. They did some time for it. I can't remember what the sentence was other than it as a period measured in weeks, not months.
I'll have a look at all of your links when I have more time on my hands. But this intrigued me: the man, "Chris", aged 47, detained in my home town of Perth in a mental ward for Covid breaches, has as its source a tweet. The source Twitter account has been suspended. The only other reference is this page,
https://www.trendsmap.com/twitter/tweet/1425741718146539524 in which the post has since been deleted. There's no local news on it. Our Murdoch-owned and extensive conservative press, much of which has been scathing of lockdowns, has no mention of it. If I had to guess, I'd say the source was actually a Russian Twitter bot.
"Senator Ted Stevens, Scooter Libby, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, George Pappadapoulos, Gen Michael Flynn, Michael Caputo, Mark Cohen, Jerome Corsi, Rick Gates, and Carter Page, to name a few. Show me the man, and I'll give you the crime."
... maybe they just committed crimes? I'm across Flynn, Manafort, Pappadapoulos, and Gates. I can't specifically remember the other names.
"I'm actually most impacted by your own anecdotes of the examples you list, from your own professional experiences and travels, or family members or clients.""
By happenstance we had a shooting in Canberra overnight. Some guy popped three bullets into a glass screen in an arrivals lounge. Seems he was mentally ill. Front page news across the country, which gives you an idea of the rarity of such events.
It is not like I can go out and buy a semi-automatic weapon. But I could get a license and buy a pistol or shotgun within the passage of a few weeks. I don't feel compelled to do so:
a. first, we have no legal right to bear arms. But even if I felt like we had a George III -type king struck by porphyria and sending in Hessian mercenaries, my shotgun is going to do very little against a tactical response group. And, fundamentally, i disagree with my government a lot of the time, but I trust my government to fundamentally do the right thing;
b. most people living in urban areas do not have guns, so I don't feel obliged to keep one to deter anyone with a gun (circular, but hopefully it makes sense);
c. we personally have dogs, so no one is likely to break into our house. Our cars, parked on the street, occasionally get broken into, and the robbers are very welcome to the half-eaten crap my kids leave in there;
d. I don't want cops randomly coming around to my house;
e. I've no inclination to take shooting or hunting up as a sport.
I'd subjectively say there's no desire in the community as a whole to own a gun.
My 2000s rabidly anti-gun stance has shifted over the years to be more tolerant, but that's because the people I have met who own guns have been absolutely ardent in keeping their guns safe - every one of them has expressed horror at the idea that their guns might be stolen and used in a crime - and our laws on gun ownership are strict but sensible.
