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You’re all so f*cking stupid

Why do you remain here if it’s so frustrating to have to deal with so many of us who are apparently stupid ?

Aren’t there other forums where your intellect is matched ? Or are you trying to show us the way to the light of true understanding?

Stop whining about the so called stupidity of others , you obviously love this forum !

I do love this forum

You shouldn’t take me TOO seriously

I’ve been busy all weekend doing family stuff and I’ve only had a chance to catch up with threads tonight (in a weird little hotel on the A1 in Northumberland)

The threads struck me as monumentally boring - lots of centrist dorks agreeing about the awfulness of Reform, and other stuff even less imaginative - so I thought I’d wade in and start a fight with everyone, to liven things up

Is all! I still love everyone, really x

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.

It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.

"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:

As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.

Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.

So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.

It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.

It's extraordinarily stupid.

Quite...

Does anybody know what the grift is with the anti-vax ?

Is there a financial gain? That was Wakefield's motivation from the very beginning.
Or is it political support? A way of corralling the gullible and easily manipulated.

Is that true on Wakefield? I always thought he was a true believer.

Wakefield held the patent for a single use measles vaccine.

Slight conflict of interest then... But is it unreasonable to argue he genuinely believed it the right thing? Or is it ALL grift?

Oh, I'm sure he was utterly sincere.

But people will always seek out things that are convenient to them. If you own an oil field, you will be naturally predisposed to think oil doesn't cause global warming. That's just regular cognitive dissonance.

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

Fair play, an earnest response. I feel differently, of course: a mixture of fear and frustration.

Fear of what?! Reform aren’t Nazis. The knicker-wetting is absurd

As for Labour I note that both John Harris and J Freedland are essentially calling for Starmer to quit, in today’s Groaniad. The main story is “Labour figures tell Starmer to stop making mistakes” (which is a bit like telling Mozart to “stop being musical”)

He’s completely lost the main organ of the Left. I wonder if he will last beyond 2026

On the mention of Mozart, there is a new version of Shaffer’s play Amadeus coming out this year as a series. I loved the film and look forward to a “bigger” version of it. I think Will Sharpe as Mozart will definitely do it justice and hope Paul Bettany does even half as good a job as F Murray Abraham did.

It will be extremely hard for them to outdo the movie, which was pretty much perfect - thanks in part to that astonishing performance by Abraham

But then who knew that Netflix would completely outmatch, with a TV drama series, Visconti’s iconic movie of The Leopard? But so it is

The Netflix Leopard is a pathetic, pale imitation of the Visconti movie.

I now know to ignore all your future opinions on anything artistic, so thanks

I’ve long realised yours are cringeingly midwit, tbh.

Aren’t you some kind of middle manager finance dude?

lol

Yes, but he left Britain "because of Brexit". Dead sophisticated.

Btw I passed “carnforth” yesterday. Didn’t realise it was an actual place

AND SO CLOSE TO TEBAY SERVICES

I have never been. I must...

Not even a brief encounter? Tut.

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.

It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.

Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.

Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.

Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.

Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.

The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.

Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist.
I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.

I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.

I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking

That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true

Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain

Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).

Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?

What are you? Six years old?

LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.

No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation

This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing

I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.

I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists

Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?

When you add up penicillin, etc., science is probably up about 3-4 billion lives overall.

Sounds like a good trade. No one's right all the time.

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.

It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.

Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.

Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.

Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.

Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.

The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.

Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist.
I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.

I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.

I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking

That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true

Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain

Great idea. How about inviting RFK jnr to run the NHS? He'll surely haul it out of its managed decline. (Probably by drastically reducing the headcount of sick uns that its looking after by virtue of his brilliant, original thinking).

Do you not understand there’s a difference between “someone who speaks at a party conference” and “someone appointed to run the entire NHS”?

What are you? Six years old?

LOL. Giving a platform at a conference which is supposed to be a platform for government to a nutjob recycling conspiracy theories is the sort of thing that has given us the Trump administration. These things have consequences, old boy.

No, they don’t. It’s an opinion expressed at a podium about four years from the next election. Not a policy document, let alone some draft legislation

This centrist dad bed-wetting about Reform is as tedious as it is embarrassing

I presume you have read Ben Goldacre's Bad Science. This is not bed wetting. It has real consequences, regardless of whether Reform comes to power or even adopt the ideas. Conspiracy theories on medical stuff causes people to die through ignorance and sometimes in their millions. This matters.

I refer you to the Lab Leak hypothesis, and the highly likely fact that science has already killed 20 million people, and destroyed entire economies, in this decade. A hypothesis which was vigorously, outrageously and scandalously repressed by who? Oh yes, the “good” scientists

Who was the conspiracy theorist there, you moron?

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.

It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.

Fortunately, her views on science and policymaking are well known. And when -as with AIDS- science clashed with her personal morality, she chose science.

Did you watch the speech? If you didn't, your critique feels somewhat baseless.

Theories about cancers aside, we know of some adverse reactions to the vaccines in some - that would be be expected with any new treatment given to a huge amount of people. Malhotra's attack on the vaccines wasn't really about vaccine harm, it was about lack of vaccine efficacy. He pointed to data that he claimed showed vanishingly little impact on hospitalisations in those given the vaccine, even when over a certain age. If that is correct, it certainly appears to undermine the case for us going as ham on vaccinations as we did.

Someone arguing against you might just as well say that Thatcher would have been brave enough to demand answers and ask the right questions, and follow the science where it led, rather than where pressure from public health bodies was coming from. But at the end of the day, we cannot know her thoughts.

The efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine and the many other vaccines has been firmly proven by multiple studies. Malhotra was spouting nonsense. Dangerous nonsense, at that.

Luckyguy is PB’s premier conspiracy theorist.
I’d be disappointed if he *didn’t* make special pleading for Reform.

I enjoyed "theories about cancers aside". He's not even attempting to plead on that one.

I have no particular badger in this baiting pit, but it’s surely healthy that heterodox opinions are heard at party conferences. We’re not gonna haul Britain out of its managed decline without some really fresh, original thinking

That necessarily means we will encounter bonkers ideas. And every so often one of these bonkers ideas will turn out to be brilliantly true

Well done Reform for allowing people to go against the grain

"Covid vaccine gave KCIII cancer" is not "really fresh, original thinking" It's fucking bonkers and massively dangerous to public health.

It's actually more bonkers than Liz "I'll tell the bond market how much debt interest we'll pay them" Truss.

You do not legitimise those views by giving them a platform on the main stage at your conference. Not unless you're a shameless grifter who doesn't give a shit about the ordinary Britons whose lives you will blight along the way.

It's interesting how you're desperate to explain this away, when you would be all over a flat earth nutter (or similar) speaking at a fringe event at Labour conference. It's clear that you've already decided to vote Reform, and therefore you have to reject any scintilla of doubt as to whether you're going to do something monumentally damaging. There are a couple of ways this goes. Either you will rationalise this by starting to spout the anti-vax nonsense yourself, or you will contort yourself to deny that Farage and Reform are pushing anti-vax nonsense as part of a general anti-establishment crusade.

Evening all. Been with Pa Woolie this afternoon. You'll be pleased to know he has proclaimed we have passed peak Reform.
Pa Woolie for the win.

We are always passing peak Reform. We've passed it here at least 5 times.

You’re feeling, shall we say, bullish? Enjoy it.
Reform will end either with a squib-like polling slump, or electoral success and the destruction of our nation.

Show me an example of a populist right wing movement in history bringing about national renewal and happiness in a developed country and I might change my mind, but I’m struggling for good creds.

Bullish, no. Genuinely optimistic about the country for the first time for ages, yes.

Reform are old school Tories - their policies are simply what worked in the UK before the country became enshittified by the Blairite consensus. It will be a huge relief to get sensible Government in the national interest again.

Inexperience is an issue, and I hope they will need Tory support, as that will be a Government with a real democratic mandate as well as a hopefully a significant parliamentary majority.

Don't be fooled by Andrea Jenkins singing and Jeremy Kyle hyping the crowds - they are serious about governing. Last week they had a press conference about billions of waste in Local Government pensions for goodness sake. Sometimes their tries are outside the line and they course correct. This is the mistake Kemi is making, possibly out of necessity. She wants a policy that is absolutely bullet proof from every angle, but sometimes you have to put a policy out and it gets tested and then develops in public.

I don't think the party of scientist Margaret Thatcher would have had a vaccine conspiracy theorist headline a Conservative Party conference.

It's very easy to impute views and actions to people when they're dead. Margaret Thatcher seems to get that more than most.

"Vaccinating Britain: Mass vaccination and the public since the Second World War", chapter 4:

As with pertussis, the DHSS took the JCVI’s advice that it should intensify the anti-CRS [Congenital Rubella Syndrome] campaign, but that it should do so by getting local Area Health Authorities to work with women, rather than through a ‘crash’ national campaign. Implementation was delayed by the general election, but the plans were carried through by the new Thatcher administration in June 1979. As an interim measure, the government tried to ensure that immunisation rates remained as high as possible among school girls by distributing information leaflets through the Health Education Council in November 1978. The DHSS also made a concerted effort to target immigrant communities where the rates of rubella were known to be higher and potential mothers were much less likely to have come through the school system or to have been in contact with health services before and during the early stages of pregnancy.

Looks to me like @rcs1000 's imputation was spot on.

So you are saying that because Thatcher supported vaccination against rubella, she would also have supported any and all vaccine programmes thereafter, regardless of the facts of the case.

It's a bit like the term 'conspiracy theorist' - not being a 'conspiracy theorist' means you can never again identify something as a conspiracy. Not being an 'anti-vaxxer' apparently means unstinting support for any vaccination programme that might ever be devised. If one decides that one campaign was a good thing, but one might not be such a good thing, one has fallen off the wagon.

It's extraordinarily stupid.

Go on, then, provide an example of Thatcher not supporting vaccination.

We call you a conspiracy theorist because you seem to believe most of them. MH17, Ukrainian bioweapon labs, climate change is a hoax... and now anti-vax too.