In fairness, aside from the covid debate itself, "hundreds of truckers constantly honking" doesn't sound like nonviolent protest and really is something I'd want the military to remove if it was happening on my street. If there's any form of non-lethal protests that we consider going too far, seems like this is it.
I am not one to expand the use of the word violent like that, but I do agree that I'd have a limit to how long I'd be OK with that if it's going on continuously, especially at night.
Depends on how intransigent the honkers are. On some level all laws are enforced at gunpoint, so anything that's illegal has an implicit "the military should stop it if necessary".
I think when leaders employ the "wait for them to get tired and leave" strategy the protestors often respond by trying to be more annoying in the moment.
Being annoying in a way that undermines the protest is a limiting factor. But how much of a limiting factor that is depends on how friendly the narrative is to the protestors' cause.
Providing a little bit more context on these (I live in Canada, though not anywhere the convoy passed through):
> He refused to meet with them, and he referred to them as racist. At first I assumed this was on priors, but it turns out he was saying some of them were waiving swastikas, which seems like a clear tactical error assuming it happened.
There were Nazi flags and Confederate flags flown (yes, in Canada, there were people with those!). There's plenty of images published of this. I assume it's a small minority in the convoy, but I don't know of any way to measure this, and regardless it's what became the face of the convoy in left-leaning Canadian media.
> “Having a group of people who disagree with the outcome of an election, who want to go a different way and bring in an alternative government, is a nonstarter in a responsible democracy,” Trudeau said.
When Trudeau said this, he was referring to some in the convoy's demand he resign. I don't know if this was an official demand on the part of the convoy, but it made a number of headlines.
> Somehow getting that last 10 percent vaccinated is ‘how we get through the pandemic’ rather than the 90 percent making a further mandate unnecessary.
Regarding this, Canada's hospital system has far, far less capacity than in the States and has been far more easily overwhelmed. Ontario's hospital system, for example, was by many measures overloaded during January. Plenty of patients needing surgery, cancer care, etc. have had their surgeries postponed, and Canada already had sky-high waiting times.
In this context, with hospitals already normally running close to 100% capacity before the pandemic, the additional burden from the 10% unvaccinated has a larger impact than it would in the States.
I suppose you could have offered a choice everyone in Canada a choice to either vaccinate or not vaccinate, and everyone who is unvaccinated signs a waiver saying they're fine being at the bottom of the triage list if they go to the hospital for covid-related disease and dealt with this issue once vaccines became widely available, but this never happened for what I would guess are obvious reasons.
(The true fix to this where we fund an increase in medical system capacity is of course not nor has it been a particularly urgent priority for politicians.)
I think there's a fair point to be made that since we're likely past the peak in Canada that further restrictions can be safely dropped for now, although one has to wonder at further variants. We really lucked out that Omicron was as mild as it was. Who knows what next winter will bring?
> Plus, in what is hilarious to us because we’re not there and don’t have to suffer through it, constant honking of all of their horns.
One final point regarding the calls to bring in the military, and this is anecdotal: the trucker convoy was in Ottawa for a number of days, and they were honking their horns throughout the night for all that time as per complaints in r/ottawa. Regardless of what you want to call this, I personally would have hoped for police or military action to remove the convoy if I lived in the neighbourhood there having to put up with it. Days of ruined sleep is, if not violence, at least something anyone should be forced to deal with in civil society. I've heard people in the area claim their pets have had serious stress issues from the honking and they've been forced to pay thousands in vet bills (though as always you should take Reddit comments with a grain of salt).
I'm editing to reflect both this and another even more helpful comment from WP where someone lives on the ground. They turn out to be far *nastier* pieces of work than USA media (in particular WaPo) and my traditional Covid news sources indicated, which is weird, cause I don't know why they'd downplay it like that. But now that I know I should fix it.
I do get Canada's hospitals have a lot less capacity, but 90% is still damn impressive and it's unlikely anyone left is going to (or even physically could!) fold in time to matter at this point.
I agree that it's unlikely that you'll get many people to vaccinate with existing measures. Short of actually forming roving vaccine squads which shoot you if you resist, it seems like Canada's hit the limit. I have a neighbour who quit their job to avoid a vaccine mandate, you're going to have a hard time coercing someone like that any harder.
The only thing I wonder about is the next winter's wave. While we may have people a high % of people vaccinated, we do not even have a majority of the population with a booster dose, and the protection of both natural immunity and vaccines seems to significantly wane ~5-6 months after your last dose.
If there's a chance next winter's variant ends up nasty and existing protection has waned, then there's an argument to be made for mandating booster shots for, say, anyone over 50. (Hopefully with an updated vaccine, though I have zero faith there.)
Given how slow the vaccine rollout was and how slowly mandates can legally be implemented (you need to give months of warning), you have to do that well in advance, and politically it'd be insane to remove mandates now and then mandate a vaccine in the summer when things look rosy rather than just maintain existing mandates (or indeed, even tighten them by defining fully vaccinated to '3 doses' while you have public support).
Something you may find interesting : there is very little (i would have said zero, but I'm not sure i have not missed something) coverage of this on French (France + french speaking Belgium and Switzerland) mainstream media... Which is as strange as WaPo not using the white supremacist angle.
Canada is far and not highly covered most of the time (Québec make it slightly more prominent in French-speaking media) but this should have made it to the news, as Trudeau tax on unvaxed was present in main news for a few days for example...
Correction : just now it was covered. In an very unemotional way : no endorsement nor critique, and no attempt to associate truckers with any political line.
Seems part of rapidly evolving pressure to let people go, i think most media have become cautious, like most of the politicians. Being more alarmist than the herd was a recipe for success, but i think many now think it's becoming a potential career-ending position. Coats are turning :-)
As you point out, if there is one group that probably constitutes an absurdly low risk of spreading Covid, it's truckers. And at a time when we're still suffering from widespread supply shortages, it is even more absurd to impose vaccine mandates when the result could well be to create massive new labour shortages as truckers quit for refusing to comply with the absurd mandate.
The whole notion of mindlessly imposing vaccine mandates on everybody, regardless of their role or context is absurd. It’s like security theater at our airports, like searching old ladies at the airport for bombs because they might be jihadist terrorists.
The alternative to do going out high risk groups (like young Middle Eastern men in the case of jihadism, or people with asthma or other comorbidities in the case of Covid) and treating that small number differently from everyone else is to make everyone equally miserable in the name of fairness and non discrimination.
Good footage but slightly out of historical context - Trudeau's words were for some of the earlier actions on the hill. Peeing on the Unknown Soldier, demanding food at a shelter for homeless. People protesting were both having fun and kind to one another AND insulting to passers-by, honking continuously and blocking EMTs.
There are people in any group you wish weren't... and people you're glad are. This guy has a lot of live walking around footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tlFgwZzmE
Global News is reporting that GoFundMe has suspended their account:
“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.”
The convoy fundraising story is another phenomenon that goes in parallel with other events where crowds can overturn tables, at least temporarily, similarly to gamestop stock.
- GoFundMe gets a call from Trudeau to block donations.
- GoFundMe reluctantly agrees and decides to send donations to charities (of recipient's choice but everybody ignores this part)
- that causes outcry and even many celebrities (e.g., Elon Musk) condemn this. DeSantis threaten to investigate GoFundMe
- GoFundMe being under pressure changes mind and promises to refund all donations automatically
- Organisers switches to GiveSendGo
- GiveSendGo experiences heavy DDoS attacks or overload (who really knows?) and yet manages to collect 2 million dollars in 24 hours
This is clearly becoming a case where it is not even about truckers anymore but outrage about political elites trying to mess with small people. Interestingly that ideas about using crypto are generally ridiculed in those discussions, and rightly so in my opinion. But probably it is even because of the principle – to prove that people should be able to give those donations openly.
If the government now tries to shut down GiveSendGo, I can predict that it will cause even bigger outrage.
Sounds like Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. Authorities naively try to suppress public unrest by cutting off the obvious flow of info/dollars not realizing there is no single kill-switch and the barrier can be routed around.
Without protest the COVID mandates would go on forever. If anything I wish we had more protests of greater intensity sooner. Then maybe we wouldn't have had lockdowns and school closures and toddlers in masks for two years.
In fairness, aside from the covid debate itself, "hundreds of truckers constantly honking" doesn't sound like nonviolent protest and really is something I'd want the military to remove if it was happening on my street. If there's any form of non-lethal protests that we consider going too far, seems like this is it.
I am not one to expand the use of the word violent like that, but I do agree that I'd have a limit to how long I'd be OK with that if it's going on continuously, especially at night.
Is there something I can choose between "it's very bad to bother people all night with honking" and "the military should stop it?"
Depends on how intransigent the honkers are. On some level all laws are enforced at gunpoint, so anything that's illegal has an implicit "the military should stop it if necessary".
I think when leaders employ the "wait for them to get tired and leave" strategy the protestors often respond by trying to be more annoying in the moment.
Being annoying in a way that undermines the protest is a limiting factor. But how much of a limiting factor that is depends on how friendly the narrative is to the protestors' cause.
Providing a little bit more context on these (I live in Canada, though not anywhere the convoy passed through):
> He refused to meet with them, and he referred to them as racist. At first I assumed this was on priors, but it turns out he was saying some of them were waiving swastikas, which seems like a clear tactical error assuming it happened.
There were Nazi flags and Confederate flags flown (yes, in Canada, there were people with those!). There's plenty of images published of this. I assume it's a small minority in the convoy, but I don't know of any way to measure this, and regardless it's what became the face of the convoy in left-leaning Canadian media.
> “Having a group of people who disagree with the outcome of an election, who want to go a different way and bring in an alternative government, is a nonstarter in a responsible democracy,” Trudeau said.
When Trudeau said this, he was referring to some in the convoy's demand he resign. I don't know if this was an official demand on the part of the convoy, but it made a number of headlines.
> Somehow getting that last 10 percent vaccinated is ‘how we get through the pandemic’ rather than the 90 percent making a further mandate unnecessary.
Regarding this, Canada's hospital system has far, far less capacity than in the States and has been far more easily overwhelmed. Ontario's hospital system, for example, was by many measures overloaded during January. Plenty of patients needing surgery, cancer care, etc. have had their surgeries postponed, and Canada already had sky-high waiting times.
In this context, with hospitals already normally running close to 100% capacity before the pandemic, the additional burden from the 10% unvaccinated has a larger impact than it would in the States.
I suppose you could have offered a choice everyone in Canada a choice to either vaccinate or not vaccinate, and everyone who is unvaccinated signs a waiver saying they're fine being at the bottom of the triage list if they go to the hospital for covid-related disease and dealt with this issue once vaccines became widely available, but this never happened for what I would guess are obvious reasons.
(The true fix to this where we fund an increase in medical system capacity is of course not nor has it been a particularly urgent priority for politicians.)
I think there's a fair point to be made that since we're likely past the peak in Canada that further restrictions can be safely dropped for now, although one has to wonder at further variants. We really lucked out that Omicron was as mild as it was. Who knows what next winter will bring?
> Plus, in what is hilarious to us because we’re not there and don’t have to suffer through it, constant honking of all of their horns.
One final point regarding the calls to bring in the military, and this is anecdotal: the trucker convoy was in Ottawa for a number of days, and they were honking their horns throughout the night for all that time as per complaints in r/ottawa. Regardless of what you want to call this, I personally would have hoped for police or military action to remove the convoy if I lived in the neighbourhood there having to put up with it. Days of ruined sleep is, if not violence, at least something anyone should be forced to deal with in civil society. I've heard people in the area claim their pets have had serious stress issues from the honking and they've been forced to pay thousands in vet bills (though as always you should take Reddit comments with a grain of salt).
I'm editing to reflect both this and another even more helpful comment from WP where someone lives on the ground. They turn out to be far *nastier* pieces of work than USA media (in particular WaPo) and my traditional Covid news sources indicated, which is weird, cause I don't know why they'd downplay it like that. But now that I know I should fix it.
I do get Canada's hospitals have a lot less capacity, but 90% is still damn impressive and it's unlikely anyone left is going to (or even physically could!) fold in time to matter at this point.
I agree that it's unlikely that you'll get many people to vaccinate with existing measures. Short of actually forming roving vaccine squads which shoot you if you resist, it seems like Canada's hit the limit. I have a neighbour who quit their job to avoid a vaccine mandate, you're going to have a hard time coercing someone like that any harder.
The only thing I wonder about is the next winter's wave. While we may have people a high % of people vaccinated, we do not even have a majority of the population with a booster dose, and the protection of both natural immunity and vaccines seems to significantly wane ~5-6 months after your last dose.
If there's a chance next winter's variant ends up nasty and existing protection has waned, then there's an argument to be made for mandating booster shots for, say, anyone over 50. (Hopefully with an updated vaccine, though I have zero faith there.)
Given how slow the vaccine rollout was and how slowly mandates can legally be implemented (you need to give months of warning), you have to do that well in advance, and politically it'd be insane to remove mandates now and then mandate a vaccine in the summer when things look rosy rather than just maintain existing mandates (or indeed, even tighten them by defining fully vaccinated to '3 doses' while you have public support).
Something you may find interesting : there is very little (i would have said zero, but I'm not sure i have not missed something) coverage of this on French (France + french speaking Belgium and Switzerland) mainstream media... Which is as strange as WaPo not using the white supremacist angle.
Canada is far and not highly covered most of the time (Québec make it slightly more prominent in French-speaking media) but this should have made it to the news, as Trudeau tax on unvaxed was present in main news for a few days for example...
Correction : just now it was covered. In an very unemotional way : no endorsement nor critique, and no attempt to associate truckers with any political line.
Seems part of rapidly evolving pressure to let people go, i think most media have become cautious, like most of the politicians. Being more alarmist than the herd was a recipe for success, but i think many now think it's becoming a potential career-ending position. Coats are turning :-)
There's also been just about zero if you google it for several days now.
As you point out, if there is one group that probably constitutes an absurdly low risk of spreading Covid, it's truckers. And at a time when we're still suffering from widespread supply shortages, it is even more absurd to impose vaccine mandates when the result could well be to create massive new labour shortages as truckers quit for refusing to comply with the absurd mandate.
The whole notion of mindlessly imposing vaccine mandates on everybody, regardless of their role or context is absurd. It’s like security theater at our airports, like searching old ladies at the airport for bombs because they might be jihadist terrorists.
The alternative to do going out high risk groups (like young Middle Eastern men in the case of jihadism, or people with asthma or other comorbidities in the case of Covid) and treating that small number differently from everyone else is to make everyone equally miserable in the name of fairness and non discrimination.
Best source I've seen for what's it's like in Ottawa is this youtube channel: https://youtube.com/c/Ottawalks
The blockade at the US border in Alberta is still, partially, ongoing and a different group of people with similar aims.
This shows the kind of people joining the convoy - definitely worth a watch!
https://twitter.com/ChickenGate/status/1489334216672305152
That was great.
Truck yeah. :)
Good footage but slightly out of historical context - Trudeau's words were for some of the earlier actions on the hill. Peeing on the Unknown Soldier, demanding food at a shelter for homeless. People protesting were both having fun and kind to one another AND insulting to passers-by, honking continuously and blocking EMTs.
There are people in any group you wish weren't... and people you're glad are. This guy has a lot of live walking around footage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3tlFgwZzmE
Global News is reporting that GoFundMe has suspended their account:
“We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/8596591/gofundme-trucker-convoy-removed/
The convoy fundraising story is another phenomenon that goes in parallel with other events where crowds can overturn tables, at least temporarily, similarly to gamestop stock.
- GoFundMe gets a call from Trudeau to block donations.
- GoFundMe reluctantly agrees and decides to send donations to charities (of recipient's choice but everybody ignores this part)
- that causes outcry and even many celebrities (e.g., Elon Musk) condemn this. DeSantis threaten to investigate GoFundMe
- GoFundMe being under pressure changes mind and promises to refund all donations automatically
- Organisers switches to GiveSendGo
- GiveSendGo experiences heavy DDoS attacks or overload (who really knows?) and yet manages to collect 2 million dollars in 24 hours
This is clearly becoming a case where it is not even about truckers anymore but outrage about political elites trying to mess with small people. Interestingly that ideas about using crypto are generally ridiculed in those discussions, and rightly so in my opinion. But probably it is even because of the principle – to prove that people should be able to give those donations openly.
If the government now tries to shut down GiveSendGo, I can predict that it will cause even bigger outrage.
> Interestingly that ideas about using crypto are generally ridiculed in those discussions, and rightly so in my opinion.
I wonder if 19th century trade unions would have been able to collect dues if they lived in a cashless society.
Sounds like Martin Gurri's Revolt of the Public. Authorities naively try to suppress public unrest by cutting off the obvious flow of info/dollars not realizing there is no single kill-switch and the barrier can be routed around.
Without protest the COVID mandates would go on forever. If anything I wish we had more protests of greater intensity sooner. Then maybe we wouldn't have had lockdowns and school closures and toddlers in masks for two years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sd5ZLJWQmss
If the military gets deployed, I am waiting to see if any analogues to the famous Tank Picture show up.