[...] Do you really believe that various govts around the world are going to be giving back various freedoms to people.. travel, assembly movement, once they have been able to take them away and cause people to be scared of other people..? That would be nice, but seems that governments tend to be quite disinclined to give back freedoms after they have been successful in taking them away.. .. and for sure I am not any kind of anti-govt person.. but there are some sickening aspects to some of these expectations of compliance matters and the shutting down of speech and the intensities of some of the deplatforming and deplatforming attempts.
I would not say that temporary restrictions on movement are a blow to freedom, since such a policy primarily affects finances ... I think no one will argue that money is the main factor of power in the global world order. In addition, I would agree with you if we lived in the 16th or 19th century, during the time of those pandemics whose names I don’t even want to name.
I like to delve into the details of world history, so I can draw a parallel between the current state of affairs and the total restriction of civil liberties in the past. Unlike past pandemics, a pandemic of a type like Covid is not capable of breaking economic ties between countries, and as a result, there can be no question of long-term economic consequences. I would add to this the fact that an ordinary person like me does not feel the economic downturn and the far-reaching consequences of this stagnation,
(keep in mind I say this as a person who lives very modestly). Btw, speaking of severed economic ties ... the pandemic still played into the hands of the United States because for them this is a great opportunity to distance themselves from China by moving production home.
I am not necessarily asserting that governments had historically refrained from attempts to control people, there were just a lot of difficulties in terms of the kinds of way that people could be tracked or blocked, and of course, self-sustaining farms would run the risk of pillage...
In recent times, the internet has truly allowed for mobility in a lot of ways and even living in various remote locations - perhaps using google translate to assist, too.
There have frequently been attempts at controlling the movement of wealth - and even in recent times, prior to bitcoin, the capital controls could be used to limit mobility - but air travel being more affordable, even governments realize that jurisdictional arbitrage becomes more possible.. and surely some passports have more possibilities than others - even if there has been a decent amount of juggling mobility since March 2020-ish.. yeah.. more than some of the juggling that had been occurring after September 2001.
I am not claiming to have any of the answers, but I am not going to poo poo the various restrictions and try to keep faith that everything is o.k.. and everything will return back to pre-March 2020 - to the extent that more free movement was possible at that time.
I guess my main points were just attempting to suggest that we are having a lot of issues (even if we cannot agree on the issues), and various governments are showing kinds of desperation and even alliances in terms of going along with some of the ways to attempt to control populations more and to create and maintain geo-mobility obstacles... . Of course, maybe some of the western countries are getting a taste of their own medicine in terms of losing more mobility than had already been restricted in a lot of other countries.. so some countries already had a lot less mobility abilities, even if they could get their finances together.
For those folks who were not planning to travel, they might find fewer issues with whatever may be happening.. and surely even some folks in this thread are considering that various aspects of the various versions of the "official story" are adequately acceptable.. and surely any of us can be susceptible to view some of these matters within some of the political channels that we might find to be more credible and just consider that the "other side" is lying.
I had already mentioned that I was more than willing to give a lot of benefit of the doubt to the virus story - but after about a year, several of the claims started to fall apart.. especially after the introduction of the various vaccines.. and the longer that the vaccines were in effect, the contradictions became more and more difficult to resolve.. so making it difficult to believe various aspects of the variations and weaving channels of "the ever changing official story."
