I sure hope Tarkan has donated

[Tarkan]

What are these Australian Camps you are talking about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/worl ... ntine.html

[Tarkan]

Neither $400 sneakers or donating to GoFundMe campaigns run by billionaires for other billionaires is really my jam.

I think you guys think I like Trump way more than I actually do.

How much do you like him?

Enough to vote for him a third time?

I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.

Enough to believe he is being persecuted by New York State and Georgia Attorney Generals and District Attorneys?

Pretty obviously yes.

Enough to believe the 2020 election was stolen from him?

Fraud likely tipped the scales in GA, PA, MI. In any event, once the EC votes, the election is over, I'm not a diehard on that hill, but Biden did brag on national TV about having the biggest voter fraud organization ever, but that was probably just his Alzheimer's kicking in.

Enough to believe he did not incite an insurrection on January 6th to attempt to nullify Joe Biden's win?

Yep. Ray Epps did a lot more incitement than Trump ever did.

[Kurt]

What are these Australian Camps you are talking about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/worl ... ntine.html

That one is paywalled for me even in TOR.

I am guessing it is the two week quarantine areas for Australians returning from abroad?

[Alphabet]

"I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.."

This is always the most cucked, simp, Stockholm Syndrome shit both sides give for voting the same, every single time, with no progress.

Muh team!

There's always a 3rd option. Most are too chickenshit, partisan, ignorant, or unwilling to accept/acknowledge that.

[ROB]

Neither $400 sneakers or donating to GoFundMe campaigns run by billionaires for other billionaires is really my jam.

I think you guys think I like Trump way more than I actually do.

I suppose what I just can't fathom is how an otherwise thinking person would consider putting him anywhere near a position of power.

For a true conservative, I can easily see folks like Romney, Saini, Reagan, Thatcher etc - people whose grounding in conservatism harks from classical liberalism and it various ideologies.

Trump is not that. Shit, I am not even sure he is conservative. But he sure as fuck is vindictive and petty. At this stage it looks to me like all you really want to do is make some tranny suffer and you're willing to sacrifice your country to do it.

Well, then let me explain it. Our current President (or whoever is calling the shots) is a disaster of epic proportions.

His very first actions when coming in office in 2021 was to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline and suspend a bunch of oil permits. During his campaign, he mentioned several times his intent to put the fossil fuel industry out of business.

2nd, given the Democrat party's love of Kashoggi and anger at his murder, Biden insulted MBS so much that Saudi Arabia is now part of Brics.

3rd, when Russia was mobilizing to invade Ukraine, Biden basically greenlit an invasion in an interview so long as it was just a little bit of territory. Well, it wasn't a little bit of territory, so the US and most of the rest of the world turned around and slapped sanctions on Russia. About the only thing significant that Russia exports, of course, is natural gas and oil. Oil spiked in prices.

Biden went groveling back to Saudi Arabia to get them to increase oil production and MBS told him to pound sand.

Now, Ukraine is one of the few areas where I actually think Biden is taking (somewhat) the right policy approach, but Biden shot us in the foot (twice) with his economic and diplomatic policy moves right before the invasion.

Biden also signaled that there would be "no more deportations" and so there was an absolute surge in illegal immigrants (sorry, now they are clasified as asylum seekers and are eligible for benefits on day 1), to the order of 3 million to 5 million, per year, since he's been in office. It was abated somewhat by Title 42 restrictions due to the Covid "emergency" - incidentally, removing TItle 42 restrictions and resumption of mass migration (aka the Replacement Theory) is almost certainly why the Biden admin decided Covid was over.

...and speaking of Covid, vaccine mandates for vaccines where the manufacturers were indemnified for any liability where they had all prior judgement histories in the billions for knowingly killing their customers in the past was tyrannical.

Conspiring with the media and big tech to censor any negative information about the vaccines or, really, anything the government didn't like was also tyrannical.

I know, I know, it was worse in Australia where you guys were doing your best China impression and locking people up in camps. But it's a slippery slope on the road to tyranny.

I could go on and on, but I'll TLDR summarize it:

1) Biden is intuitively wrong on just about everything that matters. He's also incredibly corrupt, has put in god awful people, and if he wasn't so senile at this point, he would likely be dictatorial. And he is senile. TBH, I'm surprised he made it this far into his term, but I definitely don't see him surviving through another 4 years.

2) Trump is, comparatively, intuitively right on most of the things that matter. I know, it's weird, because he's an unlikable, pompous ass without any real intellectual rigor. Trump is probably corrupt as well though (I don't see how anyone involved in NYC real estate in the 80s wouldn't be corrupt) but at least it's not the Chinese pulling his chain.

See, again, when I ask about Trump you talk 90% about Biden. I asked "why Trump" not "Why not Biden?" There are plenty of conservatives to choose from.

[ROB]

"I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.."

This is always the most cucked, simp, Stockholm Syndrome shit both sides give for voting the same, every single time, with no progress.

Muh team!

There's always a 3rd option. Most are too chickenshit, partisan, ignorant, or unwilling to accept/acknowledge that.

You never go full retard.

[ROB]

What are these Australian Camps you are talking about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/worl ... ntine.html

That one is paywalled for me even in TOR.

I am guessing it is the two week quarantine areas for Australians returning from abroad?

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AUSTRALIA DISPATCH

Australia Is Betting on Remote Quarantine. Here’s What I Learned on the Inside.
The pandemic has reinforced countries’ peculiar currents of national identity. In Australia, it’s a collectivist urge, sometimes at the expense of personal liberty.

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Cleaners at the Howard Springs quarantine center, the only one of its kind in Australia.Credit...Damien Cave/The New York Times

Damien Cave
By Damien Cave
Published Aug. 20, 2021
Updated Sept. 23, 2021
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HOWARD SPRINGS, Australia — On Day 8 of my two-week stay at Australia’s only remote, dedicated facility for Covid quarantine, I called my 11-year-old daughter at home in Sydney to ask how her day at school had gone. All I heard was a long pause.

“Dad,” she said. “It’s Saturday.”

I looked out the window as if my confusion could be cleared by the brown all around me — the single-story metal lodging, the pathways, the bags of food that had just been dropped off by workers in face shields. It was not yet 5 p.m. and they were delivering dinner?

Such is life in a former mining camp near the northern tip of the country, in a place called Howard Springs — a temporary home for hundreds of domestic and international travelers being forced to wait around long enough to prove they’re Covid-free.

Image

Michael Nayda, a marine engineer from Sydney, being swabbed for Covid-19 on his second day in quarantine.Credit...Damien Cave/The New York Times

Quarantine has been a physical and temporal in-between ever since the first lazarettos were set up to fight the Black Death in medieval Europe. The practice, as Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley write in their fascinating new book “Until Proven Safe,” is both a medical tool and “an usually poetic metaphor for any number of moral, ethical and religious ills: It is a period of waiting to see if something hidden within you will be revealed.”

My experience exposed more than I expected, about human nature but also about the ways that the pandemic keeps pushing countries back into their own peculiar currents of national identity. In the United States, it’s individualism. In Australia, it’s the collectivist urge to protect the many by treating the few as a potential threat, sometimes at the expense of personal liberty.

Australia stands nearly alone in its bet on quarantine infrastructure as a long-term answer to the pandemic. Two more camps, each with a capacity of about 2,000 people, are being built outside Brisbane and Melbourne, and Sydney and Perth may not be far behind. The sites, called “centers for national resilience,” are an embodiment of the country’s commitment to Covid zero.

Officials maintain that these camps, which are mostly for travelers but can also be used to isolate the contagious, are necessary because hotel quarantine has repeatedly let Covid leak into the community. The current Delta surge that has led to lockdowns for half of the country began in June with an unvaccinated airport driver transporting people back and forth.

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Workers delivering dinner. They work in only one block of the quarantine facility at a time to minimize the risk of spreading infection.Credit...Damien Cave/The New York Times

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Howard Springs, which has yet to have a Covid outbreak traced to it since it opened last year, is the new model.

More on Covid-19
Easing Isolation Rules: The C.D.C. is considering loosening its recommendations regarding how long people should isolate after testing positive for the coronavirus, a reflection of changing attitudes and norms as the pandemic recedes.
Overlooked Clues: Newly released documents indicate that a U.S. genetic database had received the genetic sequence of the coronavirus two weeks before it was made public by others.
A Diminished Threat: Americans are once again riding a tide of respiratory ailments, including Covid. But so far, this winter’s Covid uptick seems less deadly than last year’s, and much less so than in 2022.
The Paxlovid Question: As Covid rises again, medical researchers are trying to understand why so few people are taking Paxlovid, a medicine that is stunningly effective in preventing severe illness and death from the disease.
“If we quantify the risk of where we put people, I think Howard Springs is the lowest risk,” said Peter Collignon, a physician and public health expert at the Australian National University in Canberra. “Hotels are 99 percent effective, and for Australia, that’s the problem — they’re not 100 percent.”

That zero-tolerance attitude has kept Covid deaths far lower than in other countries, while dividing Australia. Most of the travelers I met in quarantine were from Sydney or Melbourne and were trying to get to Western Australia or Queensland, states that had shut their borders to anyone from a location with even a few dozen Covid cases. They would not let us enter and quarantine at our own cost, even when fully vaccinated.

So we had to go to the Northern Territory, the only place in Australia that would accept us. Howard Springs was what Malta had been to the British Empire — a place to let someone else deal with the problem.

And we were among the last ones in. A few days after we landed in Darwin, territory officials declared that we had exploited a “loophole” that would be closed. Howard Springs could no longer be used as an extended layover zone.

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No beef or pork is served at the camp. Alcohol is prohibited. Credit...Damien Cave/The New York Times

“The policy is popular,” said Paul Italiano, an energy executive, who was moving to Perth, the capital of Western Australia, with his family after a few years in Sydney. “When we get back, we’re probably going to want to build a wall too.”

After all, he said, it had worked: Western Australia’s seven-day average for Covid cases during most of the pandemic has been, well, zero.

Sign up for the Australia Letter Newsletter Conversation starters about Australia and insight on the global stories that matter most, sent weekly by the Times’s Australia bureau. Plus: heaps of local recommendations. Get it sent to your inbox.
I wondered if an American like me could warm up to the approach.

Most of us in D block — where I was placed and could talk to a few people at a safe distance from our rooms’ verandas — arrived feeling irritated. Michael Nayda, a marine engineer who lives in Sydney but had a job out of the port in Darwin, said he was frustrated with the people violating lockdown rules and keeping caseloads rising. I was upset about the hassle and cost. The extra flights plus the fees for Howard Springs (2,500 Australian dollars, or $1,825, for 14 days, including food) seemed to make little economic or scientific sense.

But at some point, I noticed an attitudinal shift. Maybe we’d been softened by the desserts — the sharp lemon meringue, the lush chocolate tart. One day, when the food delivery carts rumbled in, I peered down our row and noticed that we were all craning our necks, leaning out from our little balconies, like animals at a zoo.

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“It’s a bit Pavlovian, isn’t it?” Mr. Nayda said. “The sound of the trolleys, the paper bags.”

Image

Health workers visiting a woman in quarantine to give her a daily temperature check.Credit...Damien Cave/The New York Times

He was right. But it was also a shared experience. Many of us fell into the same daily routine: up early, exercise outside, work or read, nap in the afternoon, return to the veranda for sunset. There was a simple natural rhythm around the most basic human needs — outdoor space and social interaction.

It was a step up, Mr. Nayda said, from the solitary confinement of hotel quarantine, which he’d endured earlier in the pandemic.

Ms. Twilley, co-author of “Until Proven Safe,” told me that Howard Springs resembled the old lazarettos.

“Historically, quarantine facilities all had to have incredible ventilation, and that inadvertently made quarantining a more pleasant experience,” she said.

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The problem, however, is that even humane quarantine amounts to a forced retreat. The decisions made by governments about who poses a risk are rarely politics-free, and frequently go beyond medicine to fears shaped by emotions and biases.

Australia fused its earliest quarantine efforts in the 1800s and early 1900s to its racist “white Australia” policy. The first director-general of Australia’s Department of Health, John Cumpston, even directly stated that quarantine was meant to keep the continent free of both diseases and “certain races of aliens whose uncleanly customs and absolute lack of sanitary conscience form a standing menace to the health of any community.”

Image

A Covid-19 testing clinic in Sydney earlier this month. The current Delta surge has shut down Sydney and Melbourne.Credit...Matthew Abbott for The New York Times

The “centers for national resilience” may echo that past — as part of Australia’s strict system of border control, often condemned for its use of indefinite offshore detention for asylum seekers.

“It sounds a bit unfair, but it’s going to be for people from countries like India, the Philippines — places where getting vaccines and public health will be more difficult to track,” Dr. Collignon said. “That’s who is going to be there.”

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By the time I left on Friday, it wasn’t just my confusion over week and weekend that made me pause. Australia also seemed to have lost its sense of time and focus. It was letting the pandemic revive its most fundamental urge since British settlement: anxious isolation.

The state-versus-state squabbles felt colonial. The quarantine expansion hinted at a parochial fear of anyone not right next door. Last month, Australia slashed its slim allotment for international arrivals in half, to just 3,000 a week. There are nearly 40,000 Australians trying to get home.

Quarantine in Australia, I realized as I walked away from the camp, snapping a selfie for my daughter, is no longer simply a place. It has become a state of mind. Hopefully it won’t be permanent.

Damien Cave is the bureau chief in Sydney, Australia. He previously reported from Mexico City, Havana, Beirut and Baghdad. Since joining The Times in 2004, he has also been a deputy National editor, Miami bureau chief and a Metro reporter. More about Damien Cave

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[ROB]

What are these Australian Camps you are talking about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/worl ... ntine.html

That one is paywalled for me even in TOR.

I am guessing it is the two week quarantine areas for Australians returning from abroad?

Tarkan's all libertarian and shit right up to the line of it being brown people.

[el3so]

Quarantine conditions are probably different than offshore asylum processing regimes. Could be though, I don't remember quarterly reports listing dessert choices.

There might be ways to use one number for tax reasons and another for loans/PR but doubt selling sneakers or other side-hustles will cover the spread or the fine. I prefer people with money pretending to have none over people with no money claiming they do. Time will tell.

[Tarkan]

"I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.."

This is always the most cucked, simp, Stockholm Syndrome shit both sides give for voting the same, every single time, with no progress.

Muh team!

There's always a 3rd option. Most are too chickenshit, partisan, ignorant, or unwilling to accept/acknowledge that.

We can't all be as brave and cocksure as you Q. What's that 3rd option again? Voting from the rooftops?

[Tarkan]

What are these Australian Camps you are talking about?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/worl ... ntine.html

That one is paywalled for me even in TOR.

I am guessing it is the two week quarantine areas for Australians returning from abroad?

Tarkan's all libertarian and shit right up to the line of it being brown people.

For sure, brown people are the worst!

[Alphabet]

"I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.."

This is always the most cucked, simp, Stockholm Syndrome shit both sides give for voting the same, every single time, with no progress.

Muh team!

There's always a 3rd option. Most are too chickenshit, partisan, ignorant, or unwilling to accept/acknowledge that.

We can't all be as brave and cocksure as you Q. What's that 3rd option again? Voting from the rooftops?

I was going to say Libertarian Party, Arkan. But you do you I guess.

[ROB]

The main thing that terrifies me about the Libertarians is their economics.

A lot of their other stuff I think is fair enough. Some is my jam, some isn't, but I can see the argument and respect it.

But let's face it - prod 90% of "Libertarians" a little and you will find an embarrassed Republican underneath.

[Tarkan]

See, again, when I ask about Trump you talk 90% about Biden. I asked "why Trump" not "Why not Biden?" There are plenty of conservatives to choose from.

See my original comment in this thread: "I think you guys think I like Trump way more than I actually do" (paraphrased).

In 2016, my preferences (in order): Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, ..., Trump I guess.

2020, there was only one candidate running.

2024, I would have preferred DeSantis.

Now the choices are Haley or Trump. Haley is another ForeverWar Deep State candidate, and as much as I like "America, Fuck Yeah!" we can't afford to fight our own wars anymore. Hell, we can't even afford to pay for Ukraine's war at this point.

[Tarkan]

"I don't really ever vote FOR someone as much as against someone else, so yes.."

This is always the most cucked, simp, Stockholm Syndrome shit both sides give for voting the same, every single time, with no progress.

Muh team!

There's always a 3rd option. Most are too chickenshit, partisan, ignorant, or unwilling to accept/acknowledge that.

We can't all be as brave and cocksure as you Q. What's that 3rd option again? Voting from the rooftops?

I was going to say Libertarian Party, Arkan. But you do you I guess.

Maybe at the local level (and I do tend to vote for libertarian judges when they run) it's an option but at the national level we have the illusion of choice between the GOP candidate and the Democratic candidate who usually work for the same people (and it's not us).