15-Minute Tyranny: The Government’s Plans for Oxford (and Everywhere Else)

[All photography in this article was taken at the anti-15-minute city protest in Oxford on the 18th February 2023].

One of the latest schemes coming out of the UK government is the 15-minute city, with Oxford one of the first cities lined up to implement this scheme, supposedly a new form of urban planning that makes every amenity available within 15 minutes of a resident’s house, so they do not have to drive. The establishment claim regarding these 15-minute cities is that they are perfectly benign and just a way to reduce traffic and protect the environment. The establishment also claims that anyone who opposes this plan is a ‘far-right conspiracy theorist’.

Liberal establishment outlet The Guardian, states:

The anti-vaccine, pro-Brexit, climate-denying, 15-minute-phobe, Great Reset axis is a strong one.

Of course, none of those positions is inherently right wing.

A report from the Oxford Mail outlines the plans for Oxford below:

ROAD blocks stopping most motorists from driving through Oxford city centre will divide the city into six “15 minute” neighbourhoods, a county council travel chief has said. The new traffic filters on St Cross Road, Thames Street, Hythe Bridge Street and St Clements would operate seven days a week from 7am to 7pm. Two more filters on Marston Ferry Road and Hollow Way would operate from Monday to Saturday. People can drive freely around their own neighbourhood and can apply for a permit to drive through the filters, and into other neighbourhoods, for up to 100 days per year. This equates to an average of two days per week.

Let’s start with addressing the pro-15-minute city arguments and their inherent problems.

The first claim is that people are opposing things being easily accessible within a 15-minute radius because they are just unhinged and like cars for the sake of it. The reality is no-one is opposing things being locally available per se. What is being opposed is making it much more restrictive for people to travel around the city and the need for ‘permits’ and the potential for that authoritarianism to increase over time.

The second claim is that all people opposed to 15-minute cities are ‘climate change deniers’. Some reject the theory of anthropomorphic global warming, that is correct. However, I don’t think that can be said as a blanket statement of all 15-minute city opponents. The other problem is that the MSM always conflates rejection of the climate change theory with denial of environmental harm in general. These are two separate issues.

I am sceptical of the Official Climate Change Narrative because I am sceptical of every Official Narrative at this point. However it’s obvious that the kind of lifestyle we have has lots of negative effects on the environment. This is the kind of lifestyle that the establishment wants, however, which makes their pleas that this is ‘just to protect the environment’ ring rather hollow. For example, the establishment supports endless wars, one of the most destructive environmental forces on the planet. They used exfoliant Agent Orange in Vietnam and depleted uranium in Iraq. They sprayed glyphosate all over the world and mocked anyone who suggested that this might have a negative environmental impact. They polluted the entire planet with aluminium despite the vast deleterious effects on wildlife. They encourage the use of pharmaceutical drugs regardless of necessity which can have a negative impact when they are urinated out of the human body and get into the water. They encourage endless consumerism of pointless tat. And of course there is a large amount of hypocrisy involved as the establishment does not want to give up their own cars or private jets.

As a result I don’t trust any government proposals to protect the environment.

So what are 15-minute cities about if they are not about the environment?

In short, authoritarian control.

15-minute cities may seem innocuous to some and it may seem as if the restrictions put in place on travel are not very extreme. However, we have to view this in the context of this scheme being promoted by the same governments that put the entire population under house arrest for two years. This is the context being ignored by those who support the 15-minute city schemes. Having put us under house arrest previously, they cannot be trusted to not do the same thing again, this time by stealth and slow totalitarianism, given that more lockdowns have probably become politically untenable.

Once you understand the desire for ‘digital identity’, as is currently being promoted by such establishment figures as Tony Blair, and the desire for ‘Smart Cities’, as promoted by the World Economic Forum, the desire to set up zoning within cities makes perfect sense. The zones will probably be implemented without too much coercion – initially. But soon – it will be considered ‘more convenient’ for the zones to be linked to digital identity checkpoints, which will form part of the ‘Internet of Things’ beloved by the transhumanist-promoting WEF. This will physically prevent travel outside of the ‘zone’ via computer as the digital systems will simply refuse to let one through the checkpoint. This digital identity can store all sorts of information, not just about ‘carbon footprints’ but also about ‘vaccination’ status and other purported information that they may wish to use to block your access to areas outside of your ‘zone’.

It is here we see the real potential of the 15-minute city and why the establishment has an interest in promoting it. They may dress it up in fluffy terms like ‘protecting the environment’ but what it means is an ever more intrusive surveillance state. This is the goal of these psychopaths.

3 thoughts on “15-Minute Tyranny: The Government’s Plans for Oxford (and Everywhere Else)

  1. Matt Human

    Hi Cassandra, It’s Mathew again.

    What if this whole thing isn’t about just climate lockdowns, authoritarianism and the digital identity?

    What if the whole is actually interlinked with various aspects like a concept called the “Digital Commons”, which is more about data monitoring inside systems, UN Sustainability goals and Homeostasis?

    – Here’s a supposed Australian member of parliament talking about the digital commons ‘system’.
    But once again the framing with Chinese Social Credit system is wrong, it’s datametrics and behaviourial metrics, that feed back into a token (see: tokenomics) d

    This is just a sample of the idea:

    Click to access Measuring-the-Civic-Commons.pdf

    [Quote]
    The following passage is taken from Bettina Warburg’s 2019 feature for the British Council, The Blockchain Revolution.

    A helpful analogy is the experience of using a vending machine. The terms of the transaction are straightforward: you drop in payment, make a selection, and in return receive your soda of choice.

    Vending machines encode a little contract ‘if I pay you, you will release a product.’ We are not relying on a bank or a salesperson to perform this transaction, rather it is being performed by code on the machine. The state of the vending machine changes over time based on each customer selection, and the machine will stop selling the soda in a given row, once it runs out. We can think of a blockchain as a similar structure: a state machine that manages the inputs and outputs of transactions, and anyone who uses it is dealing with the same reality – the same vending machine. Expand this simple analogy to image a machine that isn’t run or owned by a company. Instead, we can each see exactly the code that the machine uses, and we are able to verify all the transactions ourselves. Rather than only delivering sodas for money, this expanded machine can execute any transaction written in code, helping to automate business logic.
    https://archive.ph/V1z90
    [/Quote]
    https://wrenchinthegears.com/2022/06/19/elite-views-on-automated-law-and-vending-machine-democracy-synthetic-pretenders-part-5/

    It’s also vending machine democracy.
    But what if it’s also DAO voting on the very aspects of what you want in that geographical cybernetically managed location

    If you can find a talk by John Clippinger, City Science Presentation – 2017.

    You might get what I’m talking about.

    Like

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