Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
Stable democracy requires distrust of government, and forced adherence of government activity to the limits defined by a constitution. “Trust” in government by the population is the surest route to tyranny and division, as you’re now seeing. People who feel and act in a real sense of solidarity, in their daily lives and not just through their mouths, are I think well served to remember this.
Conversely, my trust in my health care is pretty high, not least because of its relatively limited connection to politics and government and my ability to change and choose service providers at will. I can understand how people who don’t have that luxury might harbor suspicion.
What I find particularly interesting in European countries is that Covid policy does not seem to be focused on achieving an end result via understanding people, but rather on enforcing government power (mainly) and following scientific doctrine, as it exists at any given moment and regardless of practicality or overall results. Much like EASA, one could say 
aart wrote:
Am I missing some?
the capability to act rather react?
I think a lot of the distrust comes from that.
Silvaire wrote:
What I find particularly interesting in European countries is that Covid policy does not seem to be focused on achieving an end result via understanding people, but rather on enforcing government power (mainly) and following scientific doctrine, as it exists at any given moment and regardless of practicality or overall results.
It will be one of the rather interesting studies to analyze how governments and people reacted to the pandemic.
In my view, the red thread which goes through the whole thing is that governments REACTED rather than ACTED. Since 2 years almost now, they are trying to catch up with the developments, which has lead to an erosion in trust with a significant part of the population. By reacting, the measures were always a reaction to a situation rather than using existing pandemic plans and putting them in action.
What the people on the street are looking for in a crisis is for someone to know what to do and to do it. Instead, what the people have seen is bickering, contradiction, change of course and most of all, a total lack of success in fighting this. We are now 2 years into this pandemic, if we believe that it was around in November 2019 unreckognized, and we are no closer to resolving the situation. The significant success was the development of vaccines. But as we can see, vaccines are a huge improvement but they have not resolved the situation in the sense that measures are a thing of the past. Just the opposite, we are going back to lockdowns now, but again as a REACTION, not action. Booster shots are recommeded as a REACTION, despite the fact that it was known they were needed.
The loss of thrust in many regards is totally understandable but varies in the reasoning why. Many people have lost trust in the government to adequately and timely react to crisis. I have lost all trust in government in this regard.
Lots of people have stopped trusting the government on a factual level. This is by far not limited to Covid, see “the big lie” in the US and similar stuff. With regards to covid, lies about masks and initial trying to downplay the crisis are some of the reasons.
In the vaccum of trust, conspiracy theorists offered alternative truths, assertive, repetitive and agressive. We can see the results now. Whereever CTs have taken over a large part of the population, Covid rages worse than ever.
Yes, a lot of stuff to figure out for future sociologists but also for strategists and the science. The lessons to be learnt will fill up libraries.
In the UK (England and Scotland, I don’t know about the other parts) I think the media have caused problems more than the governments, by giving publicity without comment on the status of who they’re quoting.
PS I’m not a trusted of either.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Whereever CTs have taken over a large part of the population, Covid rages worse than ever.
Would disagree with that and suggest we fact check it…
Mooney_Driver wrote:
The lessons to be learnt will fill up libraries.
The issue with humans is that we rarely learn from mistakes and errors. Our history from the get go is littered with examples.
I think one has to understand the strategic game plan of all of this. In five years time we may all be sitting saying ‘I told you so’. Question is, which camp. The Believers or the CT lot.
But in order to prepare in advance to something you need to have an enormous amount of resources available and waiting doing not very much and you face the problem of moving into action on something that in all probability would not turn out to be much anyway.
and you have to maintain and test if appropriate the reserves
Both actions cost a great deal of money.
Look at the time the UK DID prepare in advance by stockpiling Tamiflu.
The result was that it was not needed and the government was then abused by everyone from the opposition parties to the national audit office describing it as a shocking waste of public/taxpayers money.
There is simply not the willingness of the population to spend this sort of money on “maybe’s”
Each time there is a bird flu outbreak in China do we close all national borders?
you say that such actions would prevent the current situation and to hell with the “economy” – well you might have a different viewpoint if your boiler has broken down, the parts are out of stock, and none are likely to be available for the foreseeable future so you can spend the winter with no heating and no hot water. Or when the NHS runs out of supplies.
As to loosing trust in Governments? – where have you been for decades
They lie
From weapons of mass destruction non existence, to we are not going to raise VAT just before HMG raised VAT to there will be no internal covid passports in the UK you have my word being statement from the UK gov. Decades ago there was the We will not devalue the pound from the UK gov in the 1970’s just before they did precisely that in the era of fixed exchange rates.
The list is endless.
Gov’s also know that if they told the full story first they’d get no buy-in. So on vax’s these were sold as have two jabs and we can get back to normal so people mostly said OK we are happy with that even if many did not particularly want them. Then the story started to shift in that boosters are needed for the elderly etc. Next the story is starting to shift towards boosters for everyone.
Instead if HMG had come out on day one by saying everyone will need 2 doses and then 6 monthly boosters for the next 5 years a lot of the population would have said up yours and sod off to HMG.
Just have seen some shocking statistics on telegram – and once again mainstream media is keeping complete radio silence:
In more than 60% of road accidents in winter in Germany (in Switzerland and Austria it’s even more than 80%) the cars had winter tires – while in less than 25% of accidents alcohol was involved.
And still the government wants us to believe that winter tires are a good and safe thing while driving under influence is dangerous! How stupid do they think we are?
😂😂😂These last 2 posts remind me of an old Monty Python sketch.
“You have a boiler?”
We have to keep warm by rubbing 2 sticks together.
Sorry serious subject I know.
Malibuflyer wrote:
In more than 60% of road accidents in winter in Germany (in Switzerland and Austria it’s even more than 80%) the cars had winter tires – while in less than 25% of accidents alcohol was involved.
I’ve heard this variation: In 99% of airline crashes, the pilots wore a white shirt.
From here
Peter wrote:
So this is of no practical relevance – fortunately!
I wish… all in all there are country depending 30-60% people unvaccined. I reckon some of them must be pilots.
In any case the move to 2G by Austria is a significant step which may well be implemented by others as well.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Just have seen some shocking statistics on telegram
An accident report I read recently had the line in it:
“The pilot died of an unnatural death, namely the crash of the airplane”.
