I'll just dance the way I feel

[dolorosa_12]

I was going to post my monthly TV roundup, as well as a longer review of one of the books I've most enjoyed this year, but I ended up spending most of the day in somewhat of a mental meltdown caused by: a) absolutely vile English football fans, b) Australia's dire vaccine rollout, c) standing for 25 minutes in a queue in the rain outside a shop for something they ultimately didn't sell, d) the latest SFF book Twitter thing (of which more later), and e) nosebleeds on and off throughout the day.

Instead, have some new Swedish electronic music.

Watch on YouTube

Comments

[lilysea]

Indeed.

Don't know if you saw it, but both the WA premier and the NSW premier

were tearing strips off Morrisson about his rollout of vacciness

in their respective press conferences today...

[dolorosa_12]

Deservedly so! I didn't see the pressers because the whole thing makes me so incredibly angry, but I'm glad to hear it.

Morrison (and a lot of Australians, let's be honest) have been acting for months as if people have a choice between living their lives much as they have been prior to the pandemic (just with closed international borders) or a minuscule risk of blood clots, when in fact the choice is between catching Covid (and spreading it to vulnerable people) or a minuscule risk of blood clots.

Yes, they should have tried to secure more Pfizer, but as someone who lives in a country where most people were vaccinated with AZ, I would have taken AZ in a heartbeat if it had been offered to me, because it's more important to get as many of the population vaccinated as quickly as possible! (I'm obviously not talking about people at high medical risk of having an adverse reaction to AZ, I'm talking about the general population.) Then again, I live in a country where more than 150,000 people died of Covid, so the consequences of not being vaccinated are more visible to me.

I wish this, and the 2019 bushfires would have political consequences for Morrison, because they demonstrate his utter failure to deal with crises. Sadly, I don't think that's the case.

[lilysea]

I would LOVE to see Australia have a competent Prime Minister

like

Mark McGowan

or

Daniel Andrews

but

Mark McGowan won't be running Federally at the next Federal election

and

apparently after his severe injuries due to a horrific fall, Daniel Andrews has promised his wife that he won't run for Federal election either.

I wish the ALP would put someone more electable than Anthony Albanese up.

[I always vote Greens 1 then ALP 2; I'm just sick of seeing other people vote LNP because the ALP Federal party leader has all the personality of a faded photocopy...]

[dolorosa_12]

I wish Australians would understand that in a parliamentary democracy like Australia, the actual party leader doesn't really matter (it's not like in the US where the president has a separate authority to make laws or veto them) — it's much more important whether you agree with the policies of the party as a whole! Whether Albanese is 'electable' or not shouldn't matter, and I hate this trend of people treating party leaders as the face of the party as a whole. There's been exactly one Australian election in which I've been eligible to vote where I liked the ALP leader, but I still held my nose and preferenced them highly every other time because I wanted a Labor government!

I think it's better to keep competent ALP premiers in place at state level given states have a lot of authority to act on their own, rather than risk them moving to the federal level and losing an effective state leader.

[trepkos]

This all sounds very stressful. I've just had an argument on Facebook with my nephew-in-law, who called me "woke" as an insult, and then proceeded to do the "poor white misunderstood cis-male who didn't mean any harm", and got blocked for it.

[dolorosa_12]

Ugh, that sounds awful. My feelings about people who use 'woke' as an insult are the same as people who used to complain about 'political correctness gone mad,' or 'bleeding hearts'. They're basically announcing to the world that they completely lack empathy.

[thawrecka]

My feelings on Australia & covid for a while has been sad hysterical laughter. I would absolutely take the AZ if that were an option open to me.

[dolorosa_12]

'Close the borders and encourage everyone within them to be "relaxed and comfortable" and live their lives unchanged' has long been the Australian political solution to every problem, including Covid. (I know the state premiers have been doing their best — although the Labor ones deciding to fearmonger about AZ so that they could weaponise it against Morrison are really not helping at the moment.)

The problem is that Morrison assumed that strict border closures would save the country indefinitely, and mitigate against the vaccine rollout (or lack thereof). He assumed people would think Australia has handled things well because (other than border closures) most people have kept living their lives unchanged. As we learnt the hard way in the UK, over nine months of last year, if you don't have a vaccine, you do actually have to make some pretty severe changes in the way you live your life. And no one is prepared to have that conversation in Australia — it's all just 'circuit-breaker' lockdowns and ever escalating border closures.

(The above is obviously not directed at you, I know you know this. It's directed at complacent people like my school friend in the NT who was griping that — horror of horrors — she wouldn't be able to celebrate Territory Day with other people but instead was reduced to having a nice barbecue ... in her massive garden, with her husband and children, with a backyard swimming pool, on a nice sunny day. I mean, honestly!)