Last Saturday, we sat eating lunch at a popular Nelson (NZ) cafe as our freedom enabled us. We could hear rumblings from the church steps just around the corner... Apparently some protest for freedom with a side of anti vax stupidity. Yes, these crackpots were using the freedom we already have in Aotearoa to protest for freedom. I have no doubt they were the same people that I'd seen doing anti 1080 & anti 5G protests for a couple of years as the rants sounded the same.
Determined not to go look at the protest/let them falsely presume all onlookers supported them, we carried on with our meal (which we'd freely been able to order using our freedom).
The next thing, the protest subsides so they could all freely go about their day, that no doubt included hanging out freely and sipping an overpriced craft beer with this being Nelson and all. The next thing. I just about choked when three of the freedom protestors walked past the cafe wearing t-shirts sporting a bunch of syringes in the shape of swastikas. Disgusting humans. Of course they're free to wear these as we have freedom of expression in NZ. The shit eating smug grins they wore at our shocked faces made my blood boil. To top it off they were followed by a moron essentially cos playing as an oppressed Jew from the Warsaw ghetto in a jersey and that bore a material star of David. This idiot carried a sign proclaiming Covid was the biggest breach of freedom since 1939.
These people. This was during our Super Saturday vaccination day. A day where we still have the freedom to protest and act like insensitive morons without any fear of persecution and certainly with the freedom to protest without being shipped off to a concentration camp.
I know by the vax stats show that this awful anti vax nonsense doesn't represent the majority of people in my dear home town, but it left me feeling sick to my stomach and angry at their selfishness at spreading lies that could end up killing people all while spouting some bullshit comparison to Nazi Germany.
A bit of a rant today, but I've been thinking about this all week... Awfulness.
Whenever I read about these really privileged white people from the upper classes spreading covid disinformation and calling for their "freedoms" I can't help but think about my, and many other peoples, experiences of surviving on income support payments (welfare) and dealing with the MSD and WINZ. Your freedoms are structurally eroded, daily:
Income support payments are set at least 20% below the poverty line so you often can't afford to participate socially; when level four restrictions came into effect many of us long-term income support recipients just shrugged our shoulders because a lot of the time we have no money to go anywhere or see anyone, anyways.
I've also done a lot of income support advocacy and over 50% of people on income support payments are disabled and many cannot afford life-saving medications - Huhana Hickey has spoken out about this a lot. Meanwhile, privileged antivaxxers are refusing to have a free vaccine that might just save their and other people's lives and... wait... for... it... the lives of disabled immunocompromised people on income support payments who are living in abject poverty.
Who gives a fuck about poor people's human rights being trampled on though, right? I don't think Dave Dobbyn is ever going to tweet about that.
It's just been wild seeing such privileged people cry out about "freedom" when they have no idea what actual oppression looks like or what it feels like to have your human rights trampled on every single day by, for example, the MSD and caseworkers at WINZ.
Anyway, sorry for the rant and I hope folks can see the connections I'm trying to make here. As always thanks for your salient reporting David.
As always, your writing resonates as does AJ Hendry’s quote. Having been born in Iran and having lived there for the first ten years of my life, I have first hand experience of true dictatorship and I am triggered by people’s posts that call NZ government a dictatorship and compare it to The holocaust and apartheid. They’re complaining about being asked to vaccinate to these horrendous historical events reflects their privilege of having never experienced such terror. Thank you for talking sense David!!!
Sadly throughout the last three months I’ve experienced a growing divide with people I considered friends who have disappeared further and further down the conspiracy rabbit hole. What’s worse is that one of them actually has a pretty decent sized platform on Instagram with 75k followers. She’s one of the more insidious kind who think “we shouldn’t judge anyone, vaccinated or not. We need love and unity, not division.” While simultaneously sharing conspiracy posts about vaccine “injuries” and “deaths.”
After sitting idly by wondering wtf to do I finally snapped and responded to one of her biggest BS-filled posts.
In my view, choosing not to be vaccinated when you can be is like getting shit-faced and getting into your car, hooning down the motorway in rush hour.
While it’s true you might not hurt anyone else, chances are you will and most likely kill someone.
This is not the same as choosing whether to eat meat or not. These people cannot comprehend how vaccines work and how fucking LUCKY we are to even have them available to us.
This plague of ignorance and lack of critical thinking is the other pandemic which I feel sadly highlights the gaps in our education system and the mistrust of government.
David, I have no idea how you can keep your sanity while reporting on this awful smelly, poisonous witches brew. I was not game to watch any of the videos. Thank goodness that you are safely out of their reach in the home of conspiracy theorists, the USA. Stay safe and thank goodness we have you armed with some amazing courage to write about this stuff.
On another issues, I had a toehole in the alternative healing/wellness community for a while. I have watched people I used to do things with go completely out the gate with this stuff. It grieves me that I am no longer welcome there. They believe that because I have been vaccinated I will shed covid on them (or vaccine on them, depends who you read). This makes me spiritually dangerous in their view, because the vaccine harms us spiritually. This is a loss for me personally, but it is minor compared with a long and slightly heated lecture I got from my son in law, who is on the very far right in the post gamergate/Ben Shapiro/Pewdiepie/Lauren Southern mould. Behind a plethora of facts about the vaccine which he believes are being covered up, is language about concentration camps and government tyranny and second class citizens. Behind that is the actual far right. I don't like anyone talking in initial capitals. You know what I mean, like Burdened With Glorious Destiny. This is what he sounded like when he was talking about fighting for freedom, I mean Fighting For Freedom. I actually don't care much about the vaccine, I was happy to get it. But it is becoming a casus belli for the actual far right. This is scary and heartbreaking. I have lost my daughter and son in law and grandchildren to this. I hope this is safe here to post about this but I am past caring.
I've been following the fallout from the mandate for teachers. It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people who've been exploiting the herd immunity provided by the rest of us all this time remain unwilling to contribute to public health by staying home, given they won't vaccinate.
They just don't seem to accept that we've only been able to tolerate them in our midst because their threat was largely academic/hypothetical, seeing as no diseases were circulating (no gratitude from them for this, btw, none). Now that shit's gotten real, and they need to step up, it seems they've never understood that was part of the deal. Even though it's always been the case of there's a measles outbreak in a school, that the non-immune stay home until it's over.
Worse, they now play victim, and use words like "discriminated against", "bullying", "shunning", "exclusion", when it's actually more like "asked to contribute", "self-imposed lockdown". In not sure what they want - would they actually still want to go to schools/ECEs and pose an infection risk to the other families there? Would they say least wear a mask? Doubt it.
And I have seen many adults bending over backwards to accommodate the feelings of
those people who arguably don't care about them to nearly the same degree.
I have yet to see any antivaxxer say "Come on, guys, if we're not going to vaccinate, then we have to protect our friends and family by staying away from other people, it's only fair."
Not Dave! I find myself yelling at my phone. But why not? He's a privileged white person used to doing what he wants and not having to sacrifice anything for others, so why not Dave? The squidgy, gelatinous filthy irony of thinking your pain is comperable to that of a holocaust victim because you can't hang out with your friends and having the freedom to say that, without a government official shooting you.
This is how these anti-vaxxers' privilege works. Their pain is the most important, the most centred the most intense and everyone must make way for it as people have, their whole lives for anything they deem important.
If only cutting ties was an option. But these are the people who we most need to bring into the fold because that's how herd immunity works. I fear it is only when they are personally affected that they will begin to understand. And by then, it may be too late.
On the up side, the longer they hold out, the less likely we'll come out of lockdown while my kids can't be vaccinated. So, weirdly, they're doing me a favour.
Well, that was a terrifying read, but very necessary. These idiots all lack what makes human beings tolerable: self-awareness and empathy for others. Thanks for posting this, David. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Nazi Germany? Jab-rape? Have any of these people taken just thirty seconds and thought about how damn offensive they are?
We're looking at a bunch of privileged white people whining about their privilege being mildly impinged upon for community good. How damn screwed up is that? While we should be trying desperately to walk alongside every single person we can into a place where they can be jabbed, emotionally and physically, instead we have a bunch of white turds who have been baking in the sun of ridiculous ideology too long preaching division instead of community.
If you have the space, the time in your ridiculous schedule of writing, do you think you could write something on all the amazing community endeavours to get us over the line and beyond? Tina Ngata's vax van comes to mind, but there are many across the country and I think we need a balm after the hell of all this!
One of my dear friends of 20+ years has just been lost to the rabbit hole - absolutely gutted. I was wondering where exactly she got the rhetoric she bombarded me with yesterday (21 messages in quick succession starting with "Cindy is a passive aggressive psychopath" after going incommunicado for a month). I can now see its directly from the Liz Gunn video. She posted a rant on her Facebook and is currently at 43 comments in support (all white and at LEAST financially comfortable). The single comment disagreeing is from someone in the UK where opening early has not gone well asking if they can have Jacinda if we don't want her. Sigh. I'm going to take myself off Facebook as I actually can't bear to watch this happening to friends.
Interesting post from ‘wooanon warrior’ (great page by the way, run by an American nurse), claiming that ‘Whenever someone does come to my page spewing conspiracies and insults I always take a look at their page. I would say 9 times out of 10 there is a bible quote in their bio’. Why is AJ Writer the only Christian on this planet that seems to have his shit together?? But, sadly it’s no longer just the happy clappers. It’s like the zombie apocalypse has taken over. On a positive note, Australia’s anti-vaxxers seem a lot quieter now they’ve been ignored and vax rates have gone up.
I also think it’s interesting that at the same time that NZ is falling apart at the seams over a simple vaccine, a long awaited vaccine for malaria became available. It was incredible to watch the news and see how mothers 👏🏼Did 👏🏼 Not 👏🏼 Hesitate 👏🏼 to vaccinate their babies. They have watched their children be maimed and die for generations and when a vaccine finally became available it was a miracle for them. We are so fucking sheltered and privileged in this country.
On a side note - this webworm community is so fantastic, and helps me feel like there are still some sane people out there who are able to have calm, insightful, and rational discussions.
Last Saturday, we sat eating lunch at a popular Nelson (NZ) cafe as our freedom enabled us. We could hear rumblings from the church steps just around the corner... Apparently some protest for freedom with a side of anti vax stupidity. Yes, these crackpots were using the freedom we already have in Aotearoa to protest for freedom. I have no doubt they were the same people that I'd seen doing anti 1080 & anti 5G protests for a couple of years as the rants sounded the same.
Determined not to go look at the protest/let them falsely presume all onlookers supported them, we carried on with our meal (which we'd freely been able to order using our freedom).
The next thing, the protest subsides so they could all freely go about their day, that no doubt included hanging out freely and sipping an overpriced craft beer with this being Nelson and all. The next thing. I just about choked when three of the freedom protestors walked past the cafe wearing t-shirts sporting a bunch of syringes in the shape of swastikas. Disgusting humans. Of course they're free to wear these as we have freedom of expression in NZ. The shit eating smug grins they wore at our shocked faces made my blood boil. To top it off they were followed by a moron essentially cos playing as an oppressed Jew from the Warsaw ghetto in a jersey and that bore a material star of David. This idiot carried a sign proclaiming Covid was the biggest breach of freedom since 1939.
These people. This was during our Super Saturday vaccination day. A day where we still have the freedom to protest and act like insensitive morons without any fear of persecution and certainly with the freedom to protest without being shipped off to a concentration camp.
I know by the vax stats show that this awful anti vax nonsense doesn't represent the majority of people in my dear home town, but it left me feeling sick to my stomach and angry at their selfishness at spreading lies that could end up killing people all while spouting some bullshit comparison to Nazi Germany.
A bit of a rant today, but I've been thinking about this all week... Awfulness.
Whenever I read about these really privileged white people from the upper classes spreading covid disinformation and calling for their "freedoms" I can't help but think about my, and many other peoples, experiences of surviving on income support payments (welfare) and dealing with the MSD and WINZ. Your freedoms are structurally eroded, daily:
Income support payments are set at least 20% below the poverty line so you often can't afford to participate socially; when level four restrictions came into effect many of us long-term income support recipients just shrugged our shoulders because a lot of the time we have no money to go anywhere or see anyone, anyways.
I've also done a lot of income support advocacy and over 50% of people on income support payments are disabled and many cannot afford life-saving medications - Huhana Hickey has spoken out about this a lot. Meanwhile, privileged antivaxxers are refusing to have a free vaccine that might just save their and other people's lives and... wait... for... it... the lives of disabled immunocompromised people on income support payments who are living in abject poverty.
Regarding anti-vaxxers crying out about the government monitoring them because: QR codes. The MSD was found to have illegally and invasively spied on their clients (people on income support payments): https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/01-06-2019/being-a-welfare-recipient-has-cost-me-my-right-to-privacy/
Who gives a fuck about poor people's human rights being trampled on though, right? I don't think Dave Dobbyn is ever going to tweet about that.
It's just been wild seeing such privileged people cry out about "freedom" when they have no idea what actual oppression looks like or what it feels like to have your human rights trampled on every single day by, for example, the MSD and caseworkers at WINZ.
Anyway, sorry for the rant and I hope folks can see the connections I'm trying to make here. As always thanks for your salient reporting David.
As always, your writing resonates as does AJ Hendry’s quote. Having been born in Iran and having lived there for the first ten years of my life, I have first hand experience of true dictatorship and I am triggered by people’s posts that call NZ government a dictatorship and compare it to The holocaust and apartheid. They’re complaining about being asked to vaccinate to these horrendous historical events reflects their privilege of having never experienced such terror. Thank you for talking sense David!!!
Sadly throughout the last three months I’ve experienced a growing divide with people I considered friends who have disappeared further and further down the conspiracy rabbit hole. What’s worse is that one of them actually has a pretty decent sized platform on Instagram with 75k followers. She’s one of the more insidious kind who think “we shouldn’t judge anyone, vaccinated or not. We need love and unity, not division.” While simultaneously sharing conspiracy posts about vaccine “injuries” and “deaths.”
After sitting idly by wondering wtf to do I finally snapped and responded to one of her biggest BS-filled posts.
In my view, choosing not to be vaccinated when you can be is like getting shit-faced and getting into your car, hooning down the motorway in rush hour.
While it’s true you might not hurt anyone else, chances are you will and most likely kill someone.
This is not the same as choosing whether to eat meat or not. These people cannot comprehend how vaccines work and how fucking LUCKY we are to even have them available to us.
This plague of ignorance and lack of critical thinking is the other pandemic which I feel sadly highlights the gaps in our education system and the mistrust of government.
David, I have no idea how you can keep your sanity while reporting on this awful smelly, poisonous witches brew. I was not game to watch any of the videos. Thank goodness that you are safely out of their reach in the home of conspiracy theorists, the USA. Stay safe and thank goodness we have you armed with some amazing courage to write about this stuff.
On another issues, I had a toehole in the alternative healing/wellness community for a while. I have watched people I used to do things with go completely out the gate with this stuff. It grieves me that I am no longer welcome there. They believe that because I have been vaccinated I will shed covid on them (or vaccine on them, depends who you read). This makes me spiritually dangerous in their view, because the vaccine harms us spiritually. This is a loss for me personally, but it is minor compared with a long and slightly heated lecture I got from my son in law, who is on the very far right in the post gamergate/Ben Shapiro/Pewdiepie/Lauren Southern mould. Behind a plethora of facts about the vaccine which he believes are being covered up, is language about concentration camps and government tyranny and second class citizens. Behind that is the actual far right. I don't like anyone talking in initial capitals. You know what I mean, like Burdened With Glorious Destiny. This is what he sounded like when he was talking about fighting for freedom, I mean Fighting For Freedom. I actually don't care much about the vaccine, I was happy to get it. But it is becoming a casus belli for the actual far right. This is scary and heartbreaking. I have lost my daughter and son in law and grandchildren to this. I hope this is safe here to post about this but I am past caring.
I've been following the fallout from the mandate for teachers. It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people who've been exploiting the herd immunity provided by the rest of us all this time remain unwilling to contribute to public health by staying home, given they won't vaccinate.
They just don't seem to accept that we've only been able to tolerate them in our midst because their threat was largely academic/hypothetical, seeing as no diseases were circulating (no gratitude from them for this, btw, none). Now that shit's gotten real, and they need to step up, it seems they've never understood that was part of the deal. Even though it's always been the case of there's a measles outbreak in a school, that the non-immune stay home until it's over.
Worse, they now play victim, and use words like "discriminated against", "bullying", "shunning", "exclusion", when it's actually more like "asked to contribute", "self-imposed lockdown". In not sure what they want - would they actually still want to go to schools/ECEs and pose an infection risk to the other families there? Would they say least wear a mask? Doubt it.
And I have seen many adults bending over backwards to accommodate the feelings of
those people who arguably don't care about them to nearly the same degree.
I have yet to see any antivaxxer say "Come on, guys, if we're not going to vaccinate, then we have to protect our friends and family by staying away from other people, it's only fair."
Not Dave! I find myself yelling at my phone. But why not? He's a privileged white person used to doing what he wants and not having to sacrifice anything for others, so why not Dave? The squidgy, gelatinous filthy irony of thinking your pain is comperable to that of a holocaust victim because you can't hang out with your friends and having the freedom to say that, without a government official shooting you.
This is how these anti-vaxxers' privilege works. Their pain is the most important, the most centred the most intense and everyone must make way for it as people have, their whole lives for anything they deem important.
If only cutting ties was an option. But these are the people who we most need to bring into the fold because that's how herd immunity works. I fear it is only when they are personally affected that they will begin to understand. And by then, it may be too late.
On the up side, the longer they hold out, the less likely we'll come out of lockdown while my kids can't be vaccinated. So, weirdly, they're doing me a favour.
Well, that was a terrifying read, but very necessary. These idiots all lack what makes human beings tolerable: self-awareness and empathy for others. Thanks for posting this, David. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
Nazi Germany? Jab-rape? Have any of these people taken just thirty seconds and thought about how damn offensive they are?
We're looking at a bunch of privileged white people whining about their privilege being mildly impinged upon for community good. How damn screwed up is that? While we should be trying desperately to walk alongside every single person we can into a place where they can be jabbed, emotionally and physically, instead we have a bunch of white turds who have been baking in the sun of ridiculous ideology too long preaching division instead of community.
If you have the space, the time in your ridiculous schedule of writing, do you think you could write something on all the amazing community endeavours to get us over the line and beyond? Tina Ngata's vax van comes to mind, but there are many across the country and I think we need a balm after the hell of all this!
One of my dear friends of 20+ years has just been lost to the rabbit hole - absolutely gutted. I was wondering where exactly she got the rhetoric she bombarded me with yesterday (21 messages in quick succession starting with "Cindy is a passive aggressive psychopath" after going incommunicado for a month). I can now see its directly from the Liz Gunn video. She posted a rant on her Facebook and is currently at 43 comments in support (all white and at LEAST financially comfortable). The single comment disagreeing is from someone in the UK where opening early has not gone well asking if they can have Jacinda if we don't want her. Sigh. I'm going to take myself off Facebook as I actually can't bear to watch this happening to friends.
Not Dave Dobbyn!!!
Interesting post from ‘wooanon warrior’ (great page by the way, run by an American nurse), claiming that ‘Whenever someone does come to my page spewing conspiracies and insults I always take a look at their page. I would say 9 times out of 10 there is a bible quote in their bio’. Why is AJ Writer the only Christian on this planet that seems to have his shit together?? But, sadly it’s no longer just the happy clappers. It’s like the zombie apocalypse has taken over. On a positive note, Australia’s anti-vaxxers seem a lot quieter now they’ve been ignored and vax rates have gone up.
I’ve come to the point where when anybody mentions “freedom” alarm bells start going off in my head.
I also think it’s interesting that at the same time that NZ is falling apart at the seams over a simple vaccine, a long awaited vaccine for malaria became available. It was incredible to watch the news and see how mothers 👏🏼Did 👏🏼 Not 👏🏼 Hesitate 👏🏼 to vaccinate their babies. They have watched their children be maimed and die for generations and when a vaccine finally became available it was a miracle for them. We are so fucking sheltered and privileged in this country.
On a side note - this webworm community is so fantastic, and helps me feel like there are still some sane people out there who are able to have calm, insightful, and rational discussions.
Paul Wilson! Thank you for your contributions to Webworm. Much appreciated.