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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3397 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Also to, beat a dead horse, closing schools is not confining kids to their rooms. At least in the US. It's not enough that people in Australia were under house arrest, we must pretend that was the case everywhere.

That's... not what happened in Australia.

During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on. I think our covid response was over-enthusiastic and proved to be stronger than was necessary, but foreigners have a completely distorted picture of what happened here.

During those lockdowns I remained able to go for walks, buy groceries, and so on

Jesus Christ, this is the bar? You know there are people serving actual prison sentences that have that same amount of freedoms, i.e. brief leaves on weekends and access to commissary?

Australia is federal and used targetted lockdowns and external and internal border controls to (broadly successfully) maintain zero COVID in unaffected areas - my understanding is that @sarker's comments would be permissible exaggeration in the case of Melbourne but false as applied to almost anywhere else in Australia.

@OliveTapenade - where in Australia were you?

Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.

I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".

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