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Mar 28, 2022Liked by epimetheus

The only emergency that exists for politicians is the governed not complying enough.

As we are old enough to remember and have personal experience of the USSR and the German Democratic Republic, we also know that there are no real way to fight this short of armed insurrection and then only if significant portions of police and military join in.

So to survive, perhaps even thrive, there a couple of universal methods:

Join the oppressors. It's a better life being the sheepdog than the sheep after all.

Make a lot of sound and fury being oppositional; either stick to your guns and get the Havel treatment, or the Allende treatment.

Escape; there are nations where technological infrastructure is far from up to date with such a system as is proposed here.

Learn the system, then game the system. Outward compliance only as and when enforced, keeping your mind free. (This one works best if one can wrangle a position as overseer of procedural matters, commissar or in logistics and transportation.)

As above, but opt out. Be of no interest to the system. Unprofitable, unexploitable, and generally useless (call it the Svejk option).

If this technological terror they've created would have been available to Frederic the Great, or Willima Pitt, or Atatürk or Magsaysay - they would all have used it. The ability to create technological control is primary to the power of ideology after all: ideology may dirct the how and the semantics of why, but if all you've got is the technology of Sidon 450BC, that sets the level of control. If you have people chipped, always online, wih the chip reposrting position, blood pressure, stress, and so on then that's what you use.

The rest is semantics and rethorics I'm afraid: a civilisation which backs off from technological innovation and implementation... well, look at the arabs and the chinese to se what that means in the longer perspective. Kings of the hill, and fat and lazy and complacent - and then in a few short decades subjugated by what they thought was perpetually uncouth barbarians (us).

However, by opposing mandates such as this, we can expose those politicians and others with a sadistic perosnality, and try to wrestle control of the implementation from then.

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Mar 28, 2022Liked by epimetheus

It is embarassing to see such plans coming from the German government that has provided proof of its incompetence regarding even local disasters, such as the 2021 floods (in particular, at the river of Ahr, where unfortunately over 100 people died). The woman who was back then the responsible minister at state level (Green party politician Anne Spiegel) did not really care about it on the evening the floods came in (except that she required that messages be gendered - Campingplatzbetreiber*innen, for connoisseurs). Now she is minister for "everything but middle-aged men" in Germany. Your suggestions at the end are reasonable indeed.

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