Universality, depending on which discipline you are explaining has different qualities but generally the quality of involving or being shared by all people or things in the world or in a particular group.
In our current upheavel the universality of human rights …
Is that the same as the universality of mathematics which must be true in all situations or say the universality of music?
Leonard Bernstein’s ongoing fascination of the universality of Mozart is interesting if you’ve never found that distraction.
But in our corner of the globe Winston has put his political universality front and centre of the covid debate in this election.
A question from a meeting in Dunedin over the weekend:
“People have died from this [covid vaccination] There has been a huge number of vaccine injured. What can be done to deal with these politicians that have killed New Zealanders?
They knew the information; their own technical advisory board had given them the information of the risk – they ignored it.
What can be done to send Bloomfield and Ardern down the road and send a message to the rest of the politicians – this is never to happen again?
Winston Peters:
And you’re quite right. I can tell you, right now, the flavour of that.
If you tried to make that happen now, you are going to have all these people dismiss you, gaslight you by saying you are a “vaccine denier”. No. “I’m not.”
What I am saying is that, “You made claims about this treatment which don’t stack up in the universality in which you have said it.”
Remember: Jacinda Ardern said, “If you take this you won’t get covid.”
But it happens over and over again and I’m sick of journalists who won’t be professional and they dismiss you.
Look at the number of people who have died; the unusual death rates post covid in so many populations.
I want to see what the explanation for that is.
Usually “they” tell you, it might have side effects and they weren’t saying it and that’s the worse thing – they should have told people the truth.
Winston has mentioned his “Belief in Universality” previously.
In this case the universality doesn’t distinguish between beneficiaries or pensioners.
Winston appears to have changed his tune and is now dancing to a different beat.
The covid information referred to was available before the covid roll-out was underway but regardless Winston declared that all people should be vaccinated and in his universality there should not be the right to refuse medical treatment.
The means test here though is that if you don’t have independent means you are a prisoner of the state and if you are a prisoner of the state you cannot be paroled which is essentially indefinite detention which is the same situation faced by those under house arrest in Tokelau (as you will find recorded in the Tokelau category on this site) and that was a case headed to the United Nations for an inexcusable breach of human rights.
This didn’t include old age pensioners, of course.
Shane Jones echoed similar in Paihia the day before.
While being forthright about personal responsibility Jones said, “Community needed to come before personal sovereignty”.
Shane Jones 24 June 2023
No doubt your thinking goes straight to the socialist thinking of 1930s Germany that saw Gypsy’s and Jews in particular confined to work camps for industrial labour as the property of the state.
The same thinking in Tokelau saw residents under house arrest, some for more than 12 months.
Winston’s universality is as questionable as Ardern’s and Bloomfield’s (@Linda_Redacted pointing out that those principles are inconsistent with a free society) and the motivation now for Winston perhaps as simple as those affected having other political representation that would pose a serious threat to the NZ First campaign to re-enter parliament at this election.
August 5th 2023
Writer of Sorts 