transport going there?
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I live in Taoyuan City. It could just be my bad luck not the regulations. Sucks when you want to treat yourself but canât.
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Most of my favourite restaurants have closed down and been replaced by claw machines, shuttered windows, or faceless chain stores selling mobile-phone tat or plasticky food. Some of them had been in business for as long as I can remember. Those people have lost their livelihoods, and will most likely have a much less pleasant retirement than they were expecting. And the rest of us are slightly worse off for them not being there. But at least we didnât get COVID! OhhâŚwait, yes we did. So their lives were ruined for absolutely no purpose.
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A few times every month I go to a business that should be open but isnât. For me, itâs a bad business practice to not update the Google Maps hours, and if Iâve gone out of my way to get there, then I never go again
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Unfortunately this is a thing with many (if not most) small businesses in Taiwan. This practice of not showing up has long predated COVID. I donât like it either as I think itâs not professional. My Taiwanese friends though defend the business owners, saying we have no idea what other pressures they may be facing (perhaps needing to take a parent to a hospital; perhaps dealing who knows what).
Guy
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Now ALL (30+ it seems is the count) of the Macau Casinos have been ordered shut for at least a week.
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I heard there is a sonic boom every time someone is infected because it happens so fast.
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Nah, thatâs just the TV newsflash announcing Every. Single. Case.
A lot of suffering the last 2 years. All the kids that grew up in isolation. For a 8 year old, 2 years is 25% of your life. And probably half of what you can even remember. My last 2 years in my 20s. Grandparents that never got to say goodbye in person. Friends that never got to enjoy their time. A lot of suffering.
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If there were a universal, one-dimensional measure for suffering, and you heaped everything together into the balance, Iâm confident that the things that were inflicted upon people in the name of âpublic heathâ add up to one of the worst crimes against humanity this planet has ever seen. It may not have been as brutal as the famines and wars of the 20th century, but the net was cast so wide, and the depredations so complex and all-encompassing, that weâll be seeing the effect of this for decades. While there were a few places on the planet that were untouched by world wars (or almost so), even people in the middle of nowhere have been caught up in COVID fever. Evangelical vaccinators have gone out to rural Indian villages where people have no idea what theyâre being asked to consent to. There was an article not so long ago about the unvaccinated on one of NZâs outlying islands being imprisoned in their homes for noncompliance with vaccination mandates. Every child on the planet now believes in the religion of COVID, with the unquestioning faith that children are prone to.
The Soviet authorities discovered very early on that you donât actually need to beat the crap out of people to break them down. A drip-drip-drip of humiliation, fear, and mild pain over a period of weeks or months is sufficient to get the job done.
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Has also become obvious that the authorities donât need to do anything themselves or even make others do it. Plenty of people willing to do it for free.
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Not only children - there are many devotees, worshippers and even preachers everywhere, including on this Forum.
So much for the Judean Peopleâs Front, splitters!
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No doubt we in Taiwan are living in a Stalinist gulag.
How did we even survive to type this words on forumosa? We may never know.
Guy
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Taiwan is so repressive, some people flew in from places that have opened up!!!
In every place and at every time, thereâs never been a shortage of volunteers to wave flags, cheer the destruction, hand out the propaganda leaflets, rat out their neighbours, or drop the Zyklon B pellets into the appropriate receptacle.
True, but you could argue that the adults are fully responsible for their choices. âResponsible adultâ is a concept we all recognise. If you suspect that perhaps youâre facing a brainwashing situation, itâs incumbent upon the thinking citizen to verify whatâs going on and take appropriate precautions. Those who didnât bother to question anything, or who mocked the people who raised the alarm, now find themselves in the position of defending transparent absurdities and disgusting crimes. To back out now theyâd have to face the opprobrium of their peers who might say âtoo late, sunshine; you had your chance months agoâ. Itâs less painful to keep up the pretense than to make the potentially-disastrous choice of facing reality at this late stage of the game. It would take an awful lot of courage to say to yourself now, OMG, the tinfoil hatters were actually right - and look what Iâve done! Not one person in 100 has that kind of mental fortitude, I reckon.
The children are innocents in all this. They donât have the experience or the position in society to challenge anything. Theyâll unquestioningly swallow everything theyâre told to, and theyâll carry their beliefs for the rest of their lives. Theyâll accept their vaccines and vitamin pills and bugburgers and UBI without a second thought, and theyâll instinctively lash out at anyone who doesnât. It is extremely hard to un-program a child.
I know, right? Surely we should have all been dead from COVID. There shouldnât be a single unvaxed person left still alive to complain. And yet here we all are. Itâs a medical miracle!
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They are just scared. I donât blame them with how governments around the world have scared them into total submission. Theyâll take 20 jabs if theyâll say it will save them and promise one day jt will be back to normal and theyâll be free.
One day they will look back and see how foolish they were and will probably deny being vaccine authoritarians. Children will learn about when people lost their minds collectively and caused their own hell for 2-3 years like many moments in history.
Taiwan is still not understanding they got fooled. Here in the UK no one cares anymore. We all got on with our lives and the Brits are out being drunks again all across Europe on holiday.
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I was just about to post a review of Meerlooâs âThe Rape of the Mindâ, which for some reason Iâd never got around to reading before. He has an entire chapter on the use of fear as a psychological tool.
The diabolical thing about fear campaigns is this: if you swallow the premise being presented, youâll be afraid of The Thing. Whatever it is. And your mind is then receptive to all sorts of suggestions for alleviating that particular fear. However, if you donât accept it, then youâll be afraid of the government (and with good reason). You then spend an inordinate amount of mental energy on finding some means to alleviate that, and you are at risk of looking for solutions among radicals and wingnuts (and other dysfunctional choices, such as alcohol). A campaign of fear therefore harms the entire population, with unpredictable/uncontrollable results.
I was reminded of this while watching a conversation between Maajid Nawaz and Bret Weinstein. Nawaz alludes to it briefly: his view is that the âunbrainwashedâ half of the population are prone to radicalization, and if anyone knows about that, he ought to.
I donât have much hope that this will happen any day soon, simply because the children were targeted (and targeted very effectively). They will grow up into the next generation of teachers and pass on the whole mythology of a human race that would now be extinct if it werenât for the cleverness of scientists and the life-saving vaccines. Itâs possible that normality will reassert itself (and youâre right, UK adults appear to be doing all the normal things that they used to) but the undercurrent of ideas that caused the problem in the first place hasnât just gone away.
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You and your malinformation, Finley. 
Though I am curious what material change, if any, is being suggested by that piece. If the 1 in 100,000 kids showing severe symptoms isnât already being monitored for by doctors and parents and taken to hospital where necessary, someone isnât doing their job.
What are they going to do in light of this supposed warning - watch for incredibly rare events even harder? Though I suspect there are no meaningful changes being suggested, and itâs just another attempt for the âexpertsâ to remain relevant.
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