November 15, 2021 - 12:28pm
Vienna
UPDATE: Don’t miss the full story and video report, now live HERE
I’m in Vienna on day one of the world’s first lockdown for only the unvaccinated.
At first glance it seems like an ordinary, if rather grey, November day — perhaps with slightly fewer people out and about than you might expect. Medical-grade masks are much in evidence, and there are queues outside all the testing centres (a negative test is an accepted alternative to vaccination).
But this is no ordinary day. As of midnight last night, around 30% of the adult population have been legally mandated to stay inside their homes. They are allowed to leave only to buy essential food, to travel to and from essential work and for physical exercise. Leisure of any kind is forbidden. In effect, this means that two million Austrians are currently under partial house arrest.
We’ve been speaking to people on the street to find out what they think, as part of a forthcoming special report for UnHerdTV.
What strikes me most is the class inflection to the whole thing. We started this morning on one of the fancier shopping streets in the old town, full of Rolex and Karl Lagerfeld stores in which well-heeled locals lined up to express their support for the lockdown. There is very little sympathy for a truculent minority that is seen as “stupid” and “having brought it on themselves”.
On the same street, however, if you approach the people wearing fluorescent vests, guarding the stores and making deliveries, you tend to get a different response. They are more reluctant to speak to us, but decidedly less supportive. “It is bullshit,” was one man’s pithy response.
Questions about the practical efficacy of such a measure don’t seem to be of much interest. When I ask people if they know that vaccinated people can also contract and transmit Covid, they tend to brush it aside as a minor detail. Not a single person we have spoken of so far referred to the likely practical outcome of this new policy — it is simply a hardening of the vaccine passport policy that so far has evidently failed to contain the latest wave of infections.
For the Government, the motivation, as always, is mainly to be seen to be doing something; the numerous anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown political parties that have grown up during Covid have made it even more of a political battle.
But for the majority of voters that support it I can’t escape the sense that the motivation is at least partly punitive. They don’t understand people who are not taking the vaccine, they don’t like them, and they are slightly afraid of them — so the simplest thing is to remove them from society altogether.
UnHerdTV’s special report from inside Austria’s lockdown for the unvaccinated will be out later this week.
Freddie Sayers is the Editor-in-Chief & CEO of UnHerd. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of YouGov, and founder of PoliticsHome.
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SubscribeThe old lame excuse for criminality: society is to blame.
There is a minority of people who if they can benefit from violence will use. Unless people are trained not to use violence for personal gain, are not punished for using it such that they are an others are deterred from using it, violence will flourish whether it is the school bully, organised crime or Putin.
Congratulations to those who managed to read the entire article.
I would think that the increase in U.K. stabbings could be easily explained by the arrival of people from cultures where knife violence is common.
In the introduction of the documentary ‘Shakespeare: Rise of a Genius’ on BBC iPlayer, it notes that in London in the 15th Century, theft & violence was so rampant that it was extremely common for people to carry knives and use them.
I’m unsure if the Mods v Rockers were what prompted the Offensive Weapons Act 1959, banning carrying flick knives and other blades/pointed articles? Knives were clearly a big problem that needed tackling legislatively.
Knife crime in the UK is not a new phenomenon.
William Shakespeare: Rocker or Mod?
I vote Mod.
Middle Eastern honor cultures.
Another day, another report of a child stabbing another child.
Surely, reasonable common sense knife control is the answer, right? That’s what I keep being told about my country’s ownership of guns as if it’s the objects that are at fault and never the people using them.
Perhaps we can finally recognize that there is a cultural problem afoot. Metal objects are not new; the willingness to use them indiscriminately is. Culture involves a mentality that puts the criminal over the victim, a mentality that treats the criminal as the victim in the affair. In New York, a man named Daniel Penny faces trial for the audacity of coming to the rescue of people being attacked by a crazy person on a subway. THAT is why, in the YouTubed conflicts that are so ubiquitous, people are far more likely to be recording the event than trying to stop it.
Culture involves a primal attitude of “he disrespected me,” as if no course other than attempted or achieved homicide exists. And there is a glaring lack of consequences for bad behavior, not just among criminals, but also among the allegedly respectable elites who face no repercussions for ideas that harm others.
This is not about ‘desire.’ It is about incentives. When bad behavior is coddled or otherwise rewarded, there will be more of it. The reverse is true when such behavior is sanctioned, harshly if necessary. It has always been thus.
“The second approach focuses on those broader social conditions, or what sociologists would identify as embedded ‘structural factors’, which include various measures for deprivation. In this reading, insight is less concerned with dangerous individuals than with society more generally.”
Hey, the 60s called. They want their outdated, discredited “it’s really all our faults” philosophy back.
You know what these kids need? Midnight basketball.
To say ‘you’re pushing the philosophical and sociological boundaries’ would be an understatement. This is full of citation and assumption signifying nothing (with apologies to the Bard).
A symbol simply of a country wantonly destroyed by limitless immigration that has brought any number of overseas warzones home to British streets.
Video games and austerity causes stabbings? Are you sure you are a professor?
I’d say that ticks the boxes nicely.
I work regularly in schools. The level of violence in primary schools – primary schools – that goes unrecorded and unreported is eye watering. Hitting, biting, kicking, chair throwing. It has become normalised in part because there is a ‘therapeutic’ culture that sees this as a legitimate expression of children’s trauma which adults, and other children, just have to suck up. We are in an almighty mess folks and good luck trying to solve it because everyone involved is just trying to live their best life, like the culture promised, so who are you to stand in their way?
I’m a retired high school teacher, and the top reason I retired early was smart phones. The last three years were a nightmare. The students were so addicted to their phones it was a losing battle. Administration would not do anything to support teachers, unlike the other high school that banned the things and breaking the rule had serious consequences. I didn’t take away in phones, because three female teachers on campus were violently assaulted when they took a phone. I loved teaching, and I ran a tight ship. But GenZ defeated me. Many of my students were poor, but all of them are going to have dismal futures. They couldn’t read well and couldn’t write their out of a paper bag.
I tried to edit my comment, but I failed. My iPad would not cooperate.
I’m impressed. This is probably one of the stupidest articles I have ever read. Look, I’m from the US and I have heard all this useless crap before. I remember homeboys in the inner cities trying to settle scores with bullets back when videogames were still 16 bit. I grew up around in a place with arsenals that would cause a Brit’s eyes to bulge and almost no violence. I have heard all the “economics” arguments before. Guess what? There are plenty of falling apart places filled with drugs and despair and somehow no drivebys. You can blame gangs but somehow these things also happen between dumbasses who have never worn colors. Don’t even get me started on the whole “social services” garbage. Also, for the record, the zombie genre is like a decade out of its zeitgeist. Oh, and before you start your “but yer gunz!” stuff, I want you to understand that the sharp-edged solution, the blunt force bludgeoning, and the good old fashioned curb stomp are still extremely popular problem-solving methods in America’s inner cities. I guarantee you take away all the guns and your brand of hoodlum would still not last a week. You should see what people get up to in other parts of our hemisphere!
It’s popular to talk about “culture” in vague terms but do you want to know the common factor in all of this petty violence? It’s an attitude. I’m not talking about anything like a, “you have insulted me. We will settle this with fists and move on with our lives.” If our inner cities had that attitude half this crap would end in a week. It is hard to describe in simple terms because it is basically an entire unwritten code of behavior. You are either strong or weak, predator or prey. Even if you want to be left alone, you have to respond to threats or even minor disrespect with serious violence otherwise you have let it be known that you are an easy target. That is why stupid, petty social media spats can end with chalk outlines. This is what you are going to have to deal with and no attempts at banning sharpened bits of metal or installing more cameras is going to help.
Want to know another thing that is absolutely going to make things worse? It’s called stopping innocent people from defending themselves in reasonable circumstances. I don’t care if you think you are oh so advanced and “civilized”. If you think that defending yourself and your family with a baseball bat in your own home from a violent thug or stabbing a murderous assailant with his own knife you wrestled from him is “scandalous”, then you are part of the problem. That’s not acting like a violent criminal. It is acting like a man and doing what needs to be done because you are left with no other choice. If you punish someone for that, you are only reinforcing this predator/prey mindset and taking away potential consequences for antisocial violent behavior. If these young men see their only choice as being some messed up binary between a dangerous thug that people fear or some disrespected weakling they will pick the thug every time. Oh, and one last thing! Some violent jackasses just need to be put in a cage away from society at large. The only way to deal with them is to get them off the streets.
FFS – I may have had a glass or two of wine this evening but this article is drivel!
A teen knifes a number of other teens (and a teacher) at a school and the corollary is that “it’s time that our society started taking seriously the desire for such violence.”
Actually NO, it’s NOT. What it is time for is for society to recognise that it is actually parents responsibility to raise their children to adulthood with a set of values and morals that say “stabbing people is not OK”. And that in order to do this they have proper authority over their children. This means they are not going to be prosecuted for smacking them, or disciplining them, or failing to “recognise” their “pronouns”, or accept their “new gender”, or punishing them for bad behaviour, or impinging upon their “rights”, or having the police rock up and arrest them for “not affirming their gender identity”. And that Schools, when the precious progeny are therein, also have a responsibility to carry that baton on the parents behalf, and not sneak around the back undermining parental input at every turn.
You want to lay the blame for this somewhere? How about the rights culture in western society, which has gone mad. Blame that. If you look at any pack animals in nature, from elephants to wolves, the young are disciplined and socialised by their parents and the herd and the pack. If they step out of line they get a whack on the backside with a trunk or a cuff across the ears with a paw. What is it that makes young humans so special that they should be exempted from this?
Virtual worlds . . . digital dystopias . . . zombie genres . . .
How about some straight forward plain and simple teaching of rights and wrongs by parents to children in the REAL world . . . Want to fix this? Then empower parents to BE parents once more and not just the sidelined caretakers of a tottering museum of useless social ideologies.
Bed.
A much bigger problem of simply importing myriad troubled families from overseas who inculcate such cultures on Britain’s streets.
That does seem to be the elephant in this particular room
At the beginning of my high school year, I had to teach the kids manners for several months. Raised by wolves.
Insulting to wolves.