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Notes -
During Covid, I believed that many of the more authoritarian measures imposed on the Irish populace with the ostensible goal of slowing the spread of the virus (in particular, vaccine passes, without which one couldn't gain access to a pub or restaurant) were the first step in the government's rollout of a police state modelled on the CCP or the US's PATRIOT ACT.
All of these measures have since been abolished and no one has had to present proof of vaccination against Covid for any reason in years. I still think these measures were a legitimate cause for concern at the time of writing, and the current sitting government make little secret of their post-Covid authoritarian aspirations (e.g. the incredibly sweeping "hate speech" bill, comparably restrictive as the recent piece of Scottish legislation, which would make it a criminal offense to have an "offensive" meme saved on your phone even if somebody else sent it to you, and which passed in the lower house but has been languishing in the upper house for over a year). But my specific prediction that the vaccine passes would remain in place indefinitely, and their role slowly expanded until they functioned like an EU-wide ID card, turned out to be untrue.
TBH, I don't think it makes sense to rollout on a permanent basis. I don't know about you, but to me even the exploiter's side of a dystopia sounds less pleasant than an open society.
I do think though for a lot of governments it served as a rehearsal for when they believe they will need to enact those measures again, for possibly less popular reasons (for instance to curb civil unrest following unpopular laws).
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