@Stigma I honestly can't speak to the fine economic details of the situation in the UK. I know that 25 years ago, British complaints about "curry-people" this and "Paki-bashing" that were heard all the way over here on the other side of The Pond.

Britain isn't as much of an island as you make it sound, especially now with the Chunnel in operation. Sure, people can't walk, but there is no shortage of boats coming and going to the British Isles.

The situation around immigrants in America is one of unofficially not only "letting" it happen but aiding and abetting it. Not by the wishes of "The Libs" but in support of certain American sectors that rely on a steady stream of "illegals" to keep costs down. It's yet another wealth transfer engine, wherein certain industries like agriculture hospitality get a workforce for below local market cost of employment. Meanwhile, the oligarch class can expend a modicum of effort and get working class Americans to punch down on immigrants while giving a pass to the industries that are profiting from them.

@Stigma

I'm genuinely interested, how can you be skeptical of authority yet use the most authoritarian mechanism, compulsion, mandate, to reach your goal?

My response to this: Until covid, vaccines were for the most part more clearly confirmed effective before rolling out to the general population and then often administered to large numbers of people in trials and voluntarily before making them mandatory for public health reasons. And, they WORKED, and solved obvious problems. People don't realize the number of Polio wings on hospitals, full of people including babies in iron lungs, and hundreds of people could get it from swimming in a public pool with someone infected.

Also, the moral and legal implications and justifications got hashed out decades ago, around the ethics of individual liberty versus collective public health. Sure there were bad batches of vaccine and negative individual outcomes, but overall the risk/benefit of mandatory vaccines was something most of the world's population had made peace with.

The sketchy origins of Covid and suspicious rush of vaccines, broke that model for who knows how many millions of people worldwide. This is unfortunate, as preventable diseases are causing mass outbreaks in certain areas; things like Measles and Smallpox that Mankind had mostly solved so effectively that they were forgotten in first world countries, fueled in part by lower compliance with mandates causing herd immunity to drop below critical thresholds necessary to prevent rapid contagion.

It will probably take a generation to get back to where Humankind was before the bogus Covid-19 "crisis" happened in terms of adequate vaccination.

@Stigma

General principles can only get you so far. An autistic system (such as that which Elon tries to impose, btw) cannot be inplemented. At some point, you have to exercise judgement. And when you have different fundamental hypotheses, you get incompatibilities.

So, it's either that the vaccine companies tried to build a vaccine during a pandemic, for the first time in human history, which would act protectively to the general population (which is my position, according to the data, even if in some cases there were side-effect, as with all drugs), or something else.

The unfortunate fact is that the "left-wing" governments handling the pandemic were Woke, which is practically another form of Nazism, so it's natural to have a lot of people confused, and adopting the opposite position, just out of opposition.