The Cattle Industry

~ Clarissa

A few weeks ago, a friend in Australia called and told me about the country’s new Covid app. Residents of South Australia are required to prove they’re in quarantine by using face recognition and geolocation on this app. If they fail to check in, the app will notify a bureaucrat with the state’s Health Department. That bureaucrat will then call the police. The police, in turn, will go to the citizen’s home and make sure he’s not taking an unauthorized walk so his dog can take a clandestine whizz. “We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” said premier Steven Marshall. Fair warning, I guess.

See here, I wouldn’t check in through the app. I wouldn’t download the app. Let the police come out every hour if they need. And if everybody were like me, these measures would flop within a day. The COVID apparatchiks at my school tried to get me to download an app. Poor buggers have repented that request since then because I turned myself into a major nuisance with loud inquiries about when had workers been given free cellphones by the university administration and how come nobody in my unit ever got a free cell phone and I’m going to discuss this issue in my meeting with the Dean because if others are getting free cell phones, then it’s a major injustice.

“There are no free cell phones, ma’am,” somebody squeaked. “You could download the app on your own cell phone.”

After I asked them to prove I am in possession of a private cell phone and demonstrate paperwork that entitles them to control my private property, they cleared out of my life in a flash. Everybody else sheepishly downloaded the app.

I grew up in a totalitarian regime. Nobody is getting me to check in through an app that I have not freely chosen to use. I don’t do things I’m told. I do things I decide to do.

The patient sheepishness of people who supposedly were born free drives me up a wall. They just obey. I don’t get this at all.

I knew Australia was famous for its cattle but I didn’t know the cattle in question had human faces. What is the point of life if you’ve got to be proving your location through an app whenever some bastard decides you should? This is physical existence but it isn’t life. As a famous Soviet writer said, “the people who forgot not only the concept by even the word ‘dignity’ will never become free of totalitarianism.”

Published by Clarissa

11 thoughts on “The Cattle Industry”

  1. That app is a South Australian thing that fortunately hasn’t caught on in the rest of the states. It’s intended to “let” you stay in your own house during quarantine rather than being locked up in a government facility. Each state has had a different approach and there hasn’t really been much Federal coordination. Where I live there is a requirement to electronically “check-in” at every location you visit (I have never downloaded that app), and indoor and outdoor masking requirements (which I only comply with when I have to to avoid having my head bashed in). There’s no escape either, as you need government approval to leave the country, or even to cross into another State.

    If there was a button to destroy every member of my local government, “opposition” included, I’d break my finger with the force I’d smash it.

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      1. I think a lot of it will eventually fade away, however, the only thing I care about is punishing the people who imposed it. I suspect there will be a Royal Commission eventually set up, but none of the people responsible will be punished, and I suspect they won’t even by voted out. This is the first time I’ve seriously considered leaving the country (when possible).

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  2. Let’s not forget that there are a lot of hysterical deepshits in the society that request and cheer on these measures. Covid app? Yes, please I need to feel safer. Vax pass? Yes, I need not to mingle with the unvaxxed, it’s not safe. We can’t resume life in the society until everyone is vaxxed.

    If you ask me, I call bullshit on all the need for safety. People are just lazy and want to sit at home being paid and do the minimum. For just a bit of convenience they give up their rights to the government tyrants.

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    1. “Let’s not forget that there are a lot of hysterical deepshits in the society that request and cheer on these measures.”

      Precisely. But it’s much higher than “a lot.” From what I’ve read, covid zero – and all its Angels, and all its works, and all its service, and all its pride – is intensely popular down under.

      I have little doubt that if Canada were an island continent, our lockdowns would have been just as cra-cra. Up to this summer, it seemed that most Canadians couldn’t get enough covid sado-masochism.

      Today, we learned that three in four Canadians harbour “a negative view” of the unvaccinated. (I’m quite skeptical of polling in the regime of the woke but this number may not be that far off the mark.)

      https://nationalpost.com/news/tensions-high-between-vaccinated-and-unvaccinated-in-canada-poll-suggests

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      1. Nothing teaches them. Nothing. They have access to all the knowledge in the world, yet they can’t figure out why they are being sicced in their brothers and sisters like a pack of dogs. What a shame.

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  4. If you want to understand South Australia, just imagine your college town having to produce its own virus lockdown protocols without any help or oversight from the state or federal government, while everyone in your town received a universal basic income, while everyone in government knew that no one in the whole country was going to pay any attention to them no matter what they did, while there wasn’t really any virus around anyway.

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