NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nah, schools are full of woke libs. Close them down instead.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
If they rage against it, no, they can't win. If you rage against anything, you can't beat it. If you have a positive alternative vision, and articulate that an agitate for it, yes they can win the battle. They can turn the opposition to ash.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
If they rage against it, no, they can't win. If you rage against anything, you can't beat it. If you have a positive alternative vision, and articulate that an agitate for it, yes they can win the battle. They can turn the opposition to ash.
Well last night we were debating whether it was appropriate to get angry about an advert claiming to be against sexism so you’ve got a long way to go.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
No. Sadly.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
What is wrong with it is it is fraudulent, quack medicine. It has no place in modern health care beyond a simple placebo.
But that is the point. Placebos are incredibly valuable and used to be easy because people couldn't read, or couldn't read Latin (aqua purissima) or doctors just lied. What with medical ethics plus the internet that is no longer possible, so the only way of getting placebos to where they are needed is homeopathy.
the other point is, people are better off going to a NHS homeopath who can probably make some suggestions about conventional treatments for their cancer, vs a pure balls out nutter.
Both substantial arguments. I think the truth should be valued for its own sake too much to admit them, but they are there.
Aqua purissima is the best cure for most idiopathic syndrome disorders, while the best preventative for iatrogenic disorder is to stick to gardening and the golf course.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
St Andrews really is just too easy for the modern pros now. 3 woods off the tee to drive a par 4 by even those who aren't in the worlds best.
Golf really needs to do what F1 does, and periodically restrict the equipment to make the courses a fair test.
When the modern driver is good for almost 400 yards, they either need to build bigger courses or make the drivers go only 300 yards.
The problem with that is this. Golf equipment company's customers want to be able to hit it as far as possible. That's how they make their money.
Well the only other option is to redesign the courses. Maybe the fairways need to be narrowed considerably, surrounded by heavy rough and with greenside bunkers on par-4s
One thing the R&A / PGA could have done but have decided not to is take a leaf from the way athletics addressed the problem with the javelin going too far, they could have put in place regulation on the golf ball (for pros) that can be used.
There are already different rules for amateurs vs pros e.g. range finder use.
Yes, a standard ball design for professional and open tournaments, is probably the easiest answer. Strikes the best balance between equipment providers/sponsors, regular members of the courses, and the pros themselves.
It doesn't even need to be a standard ball for all, rather that its characteristics don't exceed certain metrics i.e. you can still use a much softer shorter flying ball, but there is going to be an upper bound.
One of the organisations I belong to supplies us with a super-abundance of woke tweets and emails every day, and there are a super-abundance of committees & administrators busy examining equality & diversity & inclusion.
We have a 100 per cent white committee of the most highly privileged in the institution reading Eddo-Lodge.
However, nothing has actually changed, e.g., if you are a woman doing a pretty menial job at the bottom, you are still pretty much ignored despite all the tweets to the contrary.
Wokery has become the Glass Bead Game.
It's a long slow grind with frequent small steps backwards and stubborn areas of resistance... but change has, is, and will keep happening.
You need to look aback over periods of 20, 50, 100, 300 years to see the changes.
What I find interesting is the number of people who accept and even support all the changes up to, say 5-10 years ago, but who say 'no more'. The same would have been seen at ay time in the past 100 or so years - e.g.
'votes for women that's sensible but let's not have any nonsense about equal pay' or
'homosexuality should not be illegal, ok, but gay marriage - no way' or
'banning discrimination against disabled people, ok, but forcing businesses to provide access* will be an unfair burden on those businesses'
etc. etc.
(*We still don't have this last one yet btw)
One of the most valid criticisms of woke politics is that it is a very useful way to distract away from more pressing inequalities, namely that of wealth.
It shouldn't be surprising that many of the most wealthiest are very happy to continue to discuss inequalities around trans issues and so on.
That would be fair and fine if the 'woke-worriers' were also banging on about wealth inequality. Not seen much of that tbh.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
No. Sadly.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
I totally agree with your final line. That was my own point too.
It is endemic, we need to live with it. If you want to cut something else to pay for filtration, I'm all ears, but if you don't, then its not a priority.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
If they rage against it, no, they can't win. If you rage against anything, you can't beat it. If you have a positive alternative vision, and articulate that an agitate for it, yes they can win the battle. They can turn the opposition to ash.
Can any golf fans explain Rory Mcilroy's odds at every single major being so short even though he's not won one since 2014 ?
Fools and their money......
The amount of time BBC radio spends talking about Rory is completely out of proportion to his record. Ever major it's "can Rory win it?" The answer 30 odd times in a row has been "no". Better golfers get far less said about them.
Who are these better golfers?
People like Scheffller, Thomas, Koepka; I think Rory's ranking flatters him, his performance in majors has been quite poor given his talent.
Rory 4 major wins, 41 professional wins, world no 1 for 106 weeks Thomas 2 major wins, 23 professional wins, world no 1 for 5 weeks Koepka 4 major wins, 20 professional wins, world no 1 for 47 weeks Scheffler 1 major win, 8 professional wins, world no 1 for 16 weeks
They are perhaps his peers, but if you have to pick the best golfer since Tiger, it is Rory.
Best since is not the same as best now, and Rory simply hasn't performed as well in majors as his rankings and talent would lead us to expect. There was a point in time when the hype wasn't hype, I can remember huge amounts of talk about "the next Tiger" and "can he catch Tiger?" It hasn't happened.
I'd love Rory to win more, it's the excessive attention Rory receives that annoys me. I doubt it helps him either.
Tiger is a once in 50 years golfer. Jones, Nicklaus and Woods stand alone. There is perhaps a second group, Hagen, Hogan, Player, Watson which may be beyond Rory, but he should get to the level of the third group, Faldo, Mickelson, Seve, Palmer, Trevino.
And he is from these shores, so it is hardly surprising he gets the most attention.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
If they rage against it, no, they can't win. If you rage against anything, you can't beat it. If you have a positive alternative vision, and articulate that an agitate for it, yes they can win the battle. They can turn the opposition to ash.
The positive alternative is somewhere in between as it is with most things. When woke used to be called "political correctness" I remember one commentator saying that a large part of PC is about being understanding and polite (not upsetting people unnecessarily basically). What is not to like about that you swively-eyed right wing bastards? Oh, and you; you lefty twats.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Both the right and the left instantiate large anti liberal groups. Old fashioned liberals get hit by traffic coming from all directions.
Sure, but in practice, in the West and the UK over recent times, the legislative restrictions on free speech have come from the right, most recently here from Priti Patel.
Fantastic point. In fact, the left have produced no legislative restrictions of any kind in the UK since 2010. Wonderful. We should all vote to keep them exactly where they are, so they can carry on the good work.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Funny thing is that I was speaking to a friend yesterday who is in Singapore.
He said things have calmed down (after forced vaccinations). He said that cases were rising but everyone was more relaxed because as we were two and a half years on "of course" the government had added extra hospital capacity.
Have we?
No. Sadly.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
I totally agree with your final line. That was my own point too.
It is endemic, we need to live with it. If you want to cut something else to pay for filtration, I'm all ears, but if you don't, then its not a priority.
How about cutting IHT allowances - that should pay for it ;-)
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
It's actually quite hard to tell what Poland really thinks because the government is in the process of shutting down democracy there. If the government was truly confident that Poles are as conservative as you claim, it would bot be acting to take control of the media, end the independence of the judiciary and generally turning the country into another Hungary.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
I don't think you're this dumb.
I'm not. But only one of us is howling at the moon...
Calling me a moon howler and a mentalist (as someone else did last night) is a really weak argument.
Engage with the substance please.
I have posted quite a lot of substance on this subject recently. To which your level of engagement was "I don't think you're this dumb". I could say the same to you.
You talked about the Beatles and votes for women. That was dumb.
Same goes for the sheep like idiots who go liking your shitposts.
Shitposts is a matter of perspective.
I am describing societal change and the fear this creates in people like your good self. That you don't like this isn't really a surprise is it?
No you aren't, mate. Diminishing returns. Societal change is you can go to prison for b*ggering another bloke - then you can't - then you can marry him. Changes in the law. There has never been a law against a person with a dick asking people to call him her, and nobody actually gives or has ever given a fuck. It's as interesting and important as someone telling you they are vegan. Hence the militants pushing it to the edge cases, at the expense of every single birth/biological woman ever born, in order to provoke a reaction.
So we need to marginalise and ostracise these militants. Freedom and Liberty can't be imposed over the rights of others. The row over the extremist end of the trans rights movement can't be used to simply scrap trans rights, nor to scrap women's safe places and their own rights.
The problem is finding a balance. My dismissal of the "anti-woke" debate is that it isn't really interested in feminism, it just wants to use it to bash the trannies with.
By seeing it as a question of "bashing the trannies" aren't you falling into the same trap as those who "think they are literally the only thing holding back the forces of evil"?
No. Because both groups exist. We have Tory leadership candidates who want to pull back on pro-migration wokeness by supporting a policy which would have had them deported to Rwanda had it existed when they came here.
So no immigrant or person with an immigrant background can be in favour of controlling borders in any circumstances?
That's a bonkers extreme to go to. Plenty of ways to control borders without being a massive hypocrite as the likes of Zahawi are.
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
It's a waste of time and money and no better than a placebo. It may stop the user from getting real treatment. Worse it indicates that the believer is not prepared to listen to the science.
Loving this view that Ther Science is some sort of monolithic oracle we just have to Listen To. If you actually engaged with it, you would find that "no better than placebo" begs an awful lot of questions.
What this is about, is mild to mod depression. Antidepressants don't out perform placebo but they are the only cost effective way of getting rid of the patient. So why fill him/her and the environment with SSRIs when you can fill them with the millionth essence of camomile?
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Indeed. In Georgian times it was not unusual for politicians, Royalty and the Aristocracy to have publicly acknowledged mistresses. That went in the mid 19th Century. It hasn't returned despite someone's best efforts.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Both the right and the left instantiate large anti liberal groups. Old fashioned liberals get hit by traffic coming from all directions.
Sure, but in practice, in the West and the UK over recent times, the legislative restrictions on free speech have come from the right, most recently here from Priti Patel.
Fantastic point. In fact, the left have produced no legislative restrictions of any kind in the UK since 2010. Wonderful. We should all vote to keep them exactly where they are, so they can carry on the good work.
The point is that if Priti Patel and her supporters are really so concerned about free speech, why are they restricting it further? Because in reality her and most of the government/establishment are far more interested in centralising power than allowing free speech. They just use free speech as a way of attracting votes but have no intent of defending it.
You know, if we'd just taken the sensible Morris Dancer Party policy of conquering France there wouldn't be any problem with illegal immigration across the Channel, because we'd own both sides.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
Curious that Frost is going for her. Suggests that the continuity Boris wing are actually very scared of her. Not sure what it is about her that puts their hackles up so much, unless it still goes back to the fact that she refused to endorse Boris in 2019. Some grudges do last after all.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
I don't really see Net Zero as "woke" - it simply reflects a desire for human civilisation not to commit suicide.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
Lack of modest clothing?
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
Given Frost’s great contribution was the NI Protocol which looks likely to cause a Trade war, Irish reunification or both before resigning in a flounce for reasons that were barely intelligible he is hardly in a position to comment on whether others are up to a job or not.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
There are piccies of a dead child in a stroller after one of the latest Russian attacks on the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsia. Lying nearby is a detached adult leg.
This war is hideous. The Russians need to be stopped.
There are piccies of a dead child in a stroller after one of the latest Russian attacks on the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsia. Lying nearby is a detached adult leg.
This war is hideous. The Russians need to be stopped.
1) It doesn't exist 2) Ok, it exists but who cares 3) Ok, I do care - nothing wrong with it 4) You're a racist
1) is a debate about what "woke" is. The things that are described as woke exist, its "woke" as a threat which doesn't.
Go back 60 years and "woke" was rock and roll. Go back 50 years before that and "woke" was the campaign for women's votes.
Just as we were better off having had The Beatles, and allowing women to participate in society, we are better off with whatever this generation's "woke" fear is.
It seems to me that the real challenge is being missed. Most PBers are in fact fairly old fashioned liberals in the sense of believing in freedom as widely as possible, with the major proviso being that, so to speak, your freedom to punch ends where my nose begins. I have no freedom to do harm or interfere with the freedom of others.
Some old fashioned liberals (I am one) fear that what is occurring is a power play. Artificial extensions are rapidly being built to the concept of what constitutes 'harm'. This explains the bogus 'snowflake' phenomenon, whereby certain expressions of free speech come under threat, not because it will hurt my nose but because I can't cope with the trauma of having to be in the same room/country/planet as that thought.
This is also the danger of 'protected characteristics'. This is mostly about who gets to order whom around.
And yet the laws taking away rights of free speech and protest are coming from the most fervent anti-woke right.
Both the right and the left instantiate large anti liberal groups. Old fashioned liberals get hit by traffic coming from all directions.
Sure, but in practice, in the West and the UK over recent times, the legislative restrictions on free speech have come from the right, most recently here from Priti Patel.
Fantastic point. In fact, the left have produced no legislative restrictions of any kind in the UK since 2010. Wonderful. We should all vote to keep them exactly where they are, so they can carry on the good work.
The point is that if Priti Patel and her supporters are really so concerned about free speech, why are they restricting it further? Because in reality her and most of the government/establishment are far more interested in centralising power than allowing free speech. They just use free speech as a way of attracting votes but have no intent of defending it.
Firstly, you're conflating right to free speech, and right to protest - you can say what you want, but you can't force me to listen to it (or, more precisely, make it impossible for me to go about my day normally).
In any case, I'm on board with the idea of Patel as a hypocrite. However, the idea that restriction of free speech is coming from the right is a complete fantasy.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
Lack of modest clothing?
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
RU sure someone isn't winding you up?
Who knows what he is (or isn't) wearing under that duffle coat....
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
It's a waste of time and money and no better than a placebo. It may stop the user from getting real treatment. Worse it indicates that the believer is not prepared to listen to the science.
But the motion was (afaik) about it being prescribed on the NHS, so the patient's physician would be the one making that call. If it was not available on the NHS, that patient might step away from traditional medicine completely.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
Arena bomb brother guilty of failing to attend public inquiry
On 28 August 2021 Ismail Abedi was questioned by police under counter terror laws at Manchester Airport while trying to leave the country. He indicated he would come back in September and was released.
He returned to the airport the following day and was able to fly out of the UK and has not returned since.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
I have never seen either government, NHS, or informed critics suggest how much additional expenditure on the NHS would be enough.
There are piccies of a dead child in a stroller after one of the latest Russian attacks on the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsia. Lying nearby is a detached adult leg.
This war is hideous. The Russians need to be stopped.
Yes but - how?
Just tell Putin that history is an unstoppable march towards progress, and he'll see the error of his ways.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
I seriously hope for your sake that you never get old, or ill.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
The Truss v Badenough battle will take off after Ravingmad drops out.
Today's vote is a bit of a phony war, but I can see Tug-End potentially leapfrogging Badenough with transfers from those eliminated.
If the tories are looking for a compromise candidate, Tugendhat is starting to look like a better bet than Mordaunt?
Settling for anyone with zero or limited governmental experience in this climate would be the mark of a deeply unserious party. It would invite unparalleled slaughter at the next election.
If you believe Frost, Mordaunt could not even cut it as a junior minister, let alone PM.
Given Frost’s great contribution was the NI Protocol which looks likely to cause a Trade war, Irish reunification or both before resigning in a flounce for reasons that were barely intelligible he is hardly in a position to comment on whether others are up to a job or not.
If Boris really does have ambitions to be waved back into Downing Street by an adoring public, then he needs outriders like Frost to be pointing out how rubbish else is compared to him.
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, Boris, as soon as we have two candidates to go to the membership. You'll enjoy life far more, rather than some frankly mad delusion that you aren't done yet. Spoiler - you are.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
I seriously hope for your sake that you never get old, or ill.
I will get old and ill. I will die.
Everyone is mortal. I'm OK with that.
I have no desire to be immortal. I have no idea to be kept alive forever while my mind and body are failing.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
I would not necessarily disagree with you on that though I do fear that it is possible we are regarding history from a high water mark and that things could easily slip back.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
Lack of modest clothing?
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
RU sure someone isn't winding you up?
Who knows what he is (or isn't) wearing under that duffle coat....
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
Lack of modest clothing?
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
RU sure someone isn't winding you up?
Who knows what he is (or isn't) wearing under that duffle coat....
For all any of us know, Paddington could be a lady. Bears have cubs of both sexes.
The gender is only a sexist 1950s assumption by Michael Bond.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
Oh come on. Filtration is cheap. At it’s simplest it’s a box with a fan on one side & a filter on the other. Add a carbon filter if you’re really paranoid. Filters are cheap. Ikea will sell you a nice looking one for £60. You can buy something more functional in bulk for much less. Ventilation can be just making sure you‘ve left a window & door open for a cross breeze. A CO2 meter will tell you whether you’re turning the air over often enough.
(I personally believe that for, eg, a school the cost of dropping a box filter in each class & renewing the filters for a year will be much less than the cost of the lost staff time due to illness gained back. For a school that’s a direct cost as well, not a hypothetical one as they have to employ cover teachers to step in for those who are off ill.)
The government could easily be nudging employers & public transport in this direction.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
The payback period for £1000 is roughly 5-6 days - but your problem is the filtration system is expenditure from this year's school budget (already budgeted so spent) that leave of absence is a cost that would fall on next year's budget (as you deal with this year's overspend).
Basically it's a simple idea that falls apart when you see how schools work..
Edit to add - that figure of course excludes insurance for supply teachers which may depending on the policy extend that 5-6 days to 5-120 days as it often kicks in after 5 days of absence.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
The main reason for that is that many of the 'woke' issues of their day - slavery, racism, sexism, gay rights etc - were facilitated by the fact that the principles of western society were based on Christianity. If you go back, the opponents of all the above were always on the back front because, if you believe that man is made in God's image and that we are all equal in the eyes of God, then how can you believe that one man can be a slave, that a woman doesn't have the same rights as a man, that gay people don't have the same rights as straights etc.
The current (and I say current because most reasonable people accept Trans people should be treated the same as everyone else) Trans issue, or claiming that white people have inalienable guilt, is controversial because it doesn't fit into this pattern. The idea that somebody can turn up and say not only "I'm a woman" but also demand that language be changed to get rid of words like woman and instead say "birthing person" or "person who bleeds" strikes many people as fundamentally unfair.
If you want to dispute the first paragraph, then I say look to the Middle East (and indeed many parts of Africa and Asia) where the societies are not based on such principles. It's fair to say that there has not been an acceptance of these principles and, in some cases (e.g. the Middle East when you compare it with the days of the Ottoman Empire or 1950s / 60s Egypt / Syria / Iran etc), there has been a regression.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Even a box filter will make a significant difference & those are extremely cheap.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
Any definition of 'equality, diversity, inclusion and acceptance of difference' which is not self contradictory and self defeating is going to be pretty bland and fairly heavily policed as to outcomes.
And therein lies the difference between this agenda and old style liberalism.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
On a technical point, public health measures generally don’t fall within the NHS budget. Air filtration in schools would presumably be the education budget. But, sure, it’s public money one way or the other.
The NHS’s budget is pretty comparable with other developed countries, a bit lower than average perhaps. The UK share of GDP spent on health is much lower than, say, in the US. So, while I gather you think the NHS budget is too high, I am happy to see it increased, as are many voters.
Public health measures like air filtration in school protect the health of the working age population and are good for the economy. I don’t see the relevance of your comments about “Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care”.
My suggestion for where to make savings would be closer international cooperation to reduce trade barriers and to go after the multinationals who avoid paying taxes with complex schemes moving money between countries.
They played a bit of Truss on the radio earlier. Hard to imagine she would move a single undecided into column with that and possibly shed some elsewhere.
Meanwhile Tommy Tug has reportedly had a good day. It would be something wouldn’t it if Truss finishes below not only Kemi but also TT later. Not beyond the realms of possibility.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
It's actually quite hard to tell what Poland really thinks because the government is in the process of shutting down democracy there. If the government was truly confident that Poles are as conservative as you claim, it would bot be acting to take control of the media, end the independence of the judiciary and generally turning the country into another Hungary.
I can't claim any special knowledge about any of these countries, but my understanding is that in Poland, as in Hungary and Russia; the socially conservative governments do benefit from genuine widespread public support outside of the 'liberal urban elites'; the latter of whom have typically fled to places like the UK.
As someone who campaigned for remain; what became clear to me at the time of Brexit was that if you go and talk to ordinary people, their views were very much at odds with the urban liberal elite who dominate the production of culture. I suspect that, to at least some extent, a similar thing is going on with woke.
Not sure about the “ clean start “ TT slogan . A fresh start seems better . I hope he does at least get to the tv debate but I think he’ll be out in the next round .
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Even a box filter will make a significant difference & those are extremely cheap.
If the teacher still catches the virus from someone else in the community, then it probably makes about the square root of f**k all difference.
Just get the virus and get on with your life. But if a school thinks its worthwhile they absolutely should be allowed to use their own budget to spend as they please, no extra budget for it though.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
I seriously hope for your sake that you never get old, or ill.
I will get old and ill. I will die.
Everyone is mortal. I'm OK with that.
I have no desire to be immortal. I have no idea to be kept alive forever while my mind and body are failing.
Which is not what the discussion is about. But you seem very reluctant to admit that. If you need to create a strawman to hit, then your position is not that strong to begin with.
In defence of Penny, what is actually so bad with homeopathy?
Isn’t Prince Charles in favour as well so PM as PM aligns Conservatives with Monarchy again would be a bonus.
What is wrong with it is it is fraudulent, quack medicine. It has no place in modern health care beyond a simple placebo.
But that is the point. Placebos are incredibly valuable and used to be easy because people couldn't read, or couldn't read Latin (aqua purissima) or doctors just lied. What with medical ethics plus the internet that is no longer possible, so the only way of getting placebos to where they are needed is homeopathy.
the other point is, people are better off going to a NHS homeopath who can probably make some suggestions about conventional treatments for their cancer, vs a pure balls out nutter.
Both substantial arguments. I think the truth should be valued for its own sake too much to admit them, but they are there.
Aqua purissima is the best cure for most idiopathic syndrome disorders, while the best preventative for iatrogenic disorder is to stick to gardening and the golf course.
Homeopathy IS aqua purissima. Until the wizards turn it into magic sugar
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
I would not necessarily disagree with you on that though I do fear that it is possible we are regarding history from a high water mark and that things could easily slip back.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
Yes, we can never know if we at a high-water mark, hence we must guard against illiberal actions of all types (including the 'up their own arse extremists' who claim to be 'woke').
There would of course have been people 50 years ago saying things like 'taking away the liberty to refuse to let your B&B to homosexuals is going too far'.
There are piccies of a dead child in a stroller after one of the latest Russian attacks on the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsia. Lying nearby is a detached adult leg.
This war is hideous. The Russians need to be stopped.
Yes but - how?
Just tell Putin that history is an unstoppable march towards progress, and he'll see the error of his ways.
Haha very good. I'm trying to convince PB reactionaries first - that's hard enough.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
It's actually quite hard to tell what Poland really thinks because the government is in the process of shutting down democracy there. If the government was truly confident that Poles are as conservative as you claim, it would bot be acting to take control of the media, end the independence of the judiciary and generally turning the country into another Hungary.
I can't claim any special knowledge about any of these countries, but my understanding is that in Poland, as in Hungary and Russia; the socially conservative governments do benefit from genuine widespread public support outside of the 'liberal urban elites'; the latter of whom have typically fled to places like the UK.
As someone who campaigned for remain; what became clear to me at the time of Brexit was that if you go and talk to ordinary people, their views were very much at odds with the urban liberal elite who dominate the production of culture. I suspect that, to at least some extent, a similar thing is going on with woke.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
Parental costs aren't something a school budget covers - it's usually enough to keep staff paid and things ticking over.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
And that will be the exception and not the norm. My kids school that hasn't happened, and I doubt its happened in many places.
Were the Covid absences because people were too sick to work because of Covid, or because they had Covid and didn't come into work despite being healthy? If the latter, then it doesn't take any investment to prevent that, just go to work unless you're actually sick.
Either way, if people wish to make this investment from pre-existing budgets, that should be their choice. If they wish to let a teacher go and use the money to pay for filtration instead, that should be their choice. Their budget, their choice how to use it. No extra money though.
@Cookie thanks to your reply yesterday re my woke question. Apologies for not acknowledging at the time. Interesting you were the only reply and you aren't typical of someone who is likely to bang on about this topic. I also noted you posted about your experience of your daughter's before so your experience is particularly interesting. My children are now several years out of school so I might be out of touch but we had no experience of this. Would love to hear from other parents. What does the school say when challenged?
To be clear, this is based on my shock from visiting schools we're considering for our daughter's senior school - she's still only 10. But it's universal: private and state, selective and non-selective. Which is odd, because the primary schools my daughters have been to are not perceptibly more woke than the state primary school I attended 30 years ago. I think it would be quite hard to challenge the school on this. It's easy to criticise the excesses of woke anonymously on an internet forum; much more risky in real life to a school which your children have to attend. You hear stories of quite hostile pushback to that sort of thing, and the last thing a parent wants to do is make life more difficult for their children.
Society can be divided into two types of people
Those who do not believe Woke is a problem = those who have not yet encountered it in work or life
Those who realise Woke is a problem = those who have now encountered it. Parents of kids age 10-15 are a classic case, because they can suddenly see it running rampant in schools
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work or life then like you say? Your statement doesn't make sense therefore does it? Maybe we have encountered it and in most cases find it irritating but irrelevant. As I said yesterday we just think pillocks and move on.
Note I asked you a question about this yesterday and you didn't reply. Only @cookie did and I find his reply disturbing. You keep banging on about it but don't say how it affects your life.
If woke is rampant why haven't we encountered it in work
I genuinely don't know what to make of this comment. Every single moderately large company has a social media team who pump out a near continuous stream of vacuous virtue-signalling nonsense on equality, diversity, inclusion etc for every minority group under the sun. It's particularly prevalent in June, when they all change their corporate logos to include rainbows for Pride month. LinkedIn becomes even more unreadable than usual because of the weight of posts on the subject. I absolutely do not understand how anyone could be in the workforce and not have noticed this, somewhere.
If that is the sum total of the WOKE DANGER then who cares? It is a largely pointless exercise in virtue signalling. So a company decides to participate in Pride - where is the threat?
Lets be entirely honest about this - these companies virtue signal a lot of things. Its not that they are asleep for most of the year and only do Pride. So "EUGH THEY'VE CHANGED THEIR LOGO STOP IT" is only attacking the LGBT cause because we don't here anything in protest when they support women or BAME or the environment etc.
Repression of us sexual deviants is still popular apparently. Which is precisely why we need Pride and companies showing their support for it. You guys create the WOKE THREAT you complain of.
No, that's just the tip of the iceberg. My point was specifically that I can't understand how anyone hasn't noticed it, because of the lengths companies go to to make it as visible as possible - the reason being that they don't actually care about any of it, they just really don't want to be on the end of a Twitter dogpile because they aren't participating.
To go back a few comments I have kids aged 10 and 14. In two separate schools. And I can't say I have noticed that Woke is "running rampant" in their schools.
For me - as a Bisexual man who only had the confidence to come out aged 40 - I don't look at companies changing their logos for a rainbow one as anything at all. Pride (happily) has become a mainstream part of our society. As has the push for female equality in pay and conditions, teaching kids about respecting each other and all of the other horrors that make some people shriek in fear.
I do understand. Societal change always provokes a minority who don't like it. Woke is just the latest threat, as the permissive society or women having the vote or the abolition of slavery was. You dislike the modernisation of the way people treat people with more humanity so it gets labelled - woke.
And just as Alf Garnett sat in London there ranting about all the things he didn't agree with changing, so Leon sits somewhere abroad doing the same. Different times, different issues to be unhappy about, same psychology.
Its fine. The woke-worriers will either get on board or they won't. Societal change is happening whether they do or don't.
We're back to the Woke Definition Paradox: wokeism is defined by its detractors as unhealthy obsession with social issues (eg playing identity politics) - it's axiomatic that it is therefore Bad, even if you completely support all the societal changes that . If you define it - as many do - as just being the underlying pace of societal change, then of course you won't see what the fuss is about.
I have no problem at all with people saying "we're spending too much time and money focused on this shit". Because we are. I've sat in company diversity training courses which tick the required boxes but do nothing about diversity. So yes, down with that sort of thing!
But in reality the anti-woke objectors don't want to stop diversity training, they want to stop the march of diversity. They wouldn't be happy if big corporates stopped twatting about changing their logo to rainbow colours to support pride for their own box tick purposes, they just want to stop Pride.
I get it - change can be scary. But you can only shape it, you can't stop it.
Diversity and Inclusion as it is currently being enforced is not about creating a more open and welcoming environment for all.
It is about counting characteristics and seeking to label everyone according to a checklist and to treat them accordingly.
It has nothing to do with celebrating the diversity of each individual and what they can bring. And it is all about creating uniformity and enforced group think
The Pride movement is fracturing because of this. I have sat in Pride meetings where the only thing in the D&I sphere the leadership is worried about is counting the number of black and brown faces in the room.
It is deeply frustrating to see a movement that still matters get torn apart from within by thinking which has stopped celebrating diversity and just wants uniformity.
Exactly. Pronoun badges were handed out at my clients Pride event last week and they had massive rainbow/trans flags on all the tables.
I didn't go.
I always refuse to give pronouns. But I always try to respect the wishes of individuals who make specific requests.
And as for Pride flags....
There is absolutely nothing in the rainbow flag that excluded anyone. With the various new 'progressive' versions are so forced that they have to be updated regularly because a new group wants their space on it.
The traditional 6 colour rainbow flag is a symbol that represents all who wish to be part of it and in no way excludes anyone.
But you aren't allowed to say that in a Pride context anymore as you are labelled as a -phobe .
1) I understand people who have changed orientation using pronouns. But cis people? Give over and stop being so hand-wringing. It says more about you than your preferred pronoun...
2) When I was at uni it was LGB. Well, I say that but B wasn't liked. Then LGBT. Then LGBTQ. Then LGBTQI. Then a plus added. I honestly don't understand some of the new definitions - pansexual? You are sexually attracted to all genders? Yeah me to, but I'm Bi. So what's your point? etc
But the Pride movement salami-slicing itself isn't a reason to give up on the positive modernisation of societal attitudes it represents. If a small number have disappeared up their own arse, just ignore them.
For some no doubt fuddy duddy old white bloke reason I farkin' hate the term "cis". It is so arch it makes me vomit.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
Always with more spending. We've borrowed enough already to pay for Covid.
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
I seriously hope for your sake that you never get old, or ill.
I will get old and ill. I will die.
Everyone is mortal. I'm OK with that.
I have no desire to be immortal. I have no idea to be kept alive forever while my mind and body are failing.
Which is not what the discussion is about. But you seem very reluctant to admit that. If you need to create a strawman to hit, then your position is not that strong to begin with.
It is what the discussion is about.
The only way to reduce demand in the NHS is to accept death. Dead people don't demand NHS care.
If you're not willing to accept death, then demand is infinite but the NHS's resources aren't. So manage the resources as well as you can, pick your priorities and go for that.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
They can rage against the woke all they like - it’s a battle they cannot win
I wouldn't be too sure about claiming inevitability about anything, in politics. The republicans efforts to roll back woke, however clumsy they are, seem to be succeeding over in the US. The big problem you have is that because it is impossible to actually discuss a lot of this 'woke' stuff in a meaningful way, people will get driven to more and more radical and extreme solutions. In a democracy movements have an ascendancy and then they eventually get replaced by something else. For a long time it seemed like the centrist world of Blair and Cameron was fixed in place, but in 2016 there was a sudden rupture with it. Alternatively, if you have a dictatorship; then it is a generally miserable experience and they all eventually fail. Nothing lasts forever.
The US are more religious which creates a lot of young people with very different attitudes to the rest of their peers. Hard to see that happening to any similar extent in the UK.
If you look at Europe though, it isn't that unusual. Poland for instance is quite conservative. Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people. It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has. The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'. It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia. The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace. However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction. It swings in different, often random, directions.
Somewhere in Poland banned Paddington or Winnie the Pooh for their lack of modest clothing, so sure wokeness is far from guaranteed there! But that is not what people mean when they say the anti woke won't win. Globally they may well win, but in the UK over the next 25 years, they won't.
Lack of modest clothing?
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
RU sure someone isn't winding you up?
Who knows what he is (or isn't) wearing under that duffle coat....
For all any of us know, Paddington could be a lady. Bears have cubs of both sexes.
The gender is only a sexist 1950s assumption by Michael Bond.
It was 1975 when a woman could open a bank account.
Really? Wow.
Times have changed. And I bet people argued against that change when it happened...
Of course they did! Just as some married men saw their wives as their property until the courts finally ruled they were not.
Change upsets people.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
And that will be the exception and not the norm. My kids school that hasn't happened, and I doubt its happened in many places.
Were the Covid absences because people were too sick to work because of Covid, or because they had Covid and didn't come into work despite being healthy? If the latter, then it doesn't take any investment to prevent that, just go to work unless you're actually sick.
Either way, if people wish to make this investment from pre-existing budgets, that should be their choice. If they wish to let a teacher go and use the money to pay for filtration instead, that should be their choice. Their budget, their choice how to use it. No extra money though.
Budgets are not fixed, eternal things sent by God. Given there’s a once-in-a-generation issue (insert SNP joke here) with a pandemic, it hardly seems odd to consider how the budget might need to change.
As for the woke agenda like all societal change there will be overshoot. All the persons with wombs etc might be the norm in 50 years or might be seen as just an overshoot of the change in people's attitudes to gender.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
Seems Twitter is down, suboptimal timing for anyone wanting to keep up with any rumours.
Putin probably pissed that all the top trendings are his ammo and fuel dump firework displays....
Like much of his capabilities I suspect his cyber capacity is massively overestimated. Think someone at Twitter was too busy suing Musk to feed the hamsters.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Just because something is endemic doesn’t mean we can’t benefit from reducing the level of infections at any given time. Air filtration & ventilation appear to do just that, going by Japan’s example. If you offered to halve the level of patients needing intensive care beds due to Covid infections then I bet Foxy would bite your hand off.
None of this requires invasive lockdowns, or enforced mask wearing. Why are you so insistent that we should do nothing & let more people die than need to BR? “Kill the weak: they had it coming” seems a bit mask-off fascist for a soi-disant libertarian like yourself, but then we all know the old trope about “scratch a libertarian ... ”. I’m a little saddened to see you head down that path to be honest: during the worst throes of the pandemic you were one of the saner voices here.
I never said kill the weak, but we have vaccines. Get over it for the rest of it, the vaccines are there for a purpose.
If filtration is economic to install then fine, go for it, but if it isn't then doing it for the sake of doing something is not "sane".
I’ve been triple vaccinated. I caught COVID-19 three weeks ago and still have a sore throat. Vaccinations are great, but they’re not perfect for COVID and we can’t rely on them.
Filtration appears to be very effective. So let’s see some budget from the Govt to install it in, e.g., schools.
Nothing's perfect. Life's not perfect. If you have a sore throat, take some Strepsils, don't waste billions in taxes over that.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
I still have the sore throat, but I was iller! I estimate I lost 3 days of work, so a 10% drop in productivity for the month. That’s happening to lots of people around the country. That impacts on the tax intake.
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
The ballpark figure for air filtration systems looks like a thousand pounds for a classroom. You don't need to prevent that much staff absence for that to pay back very quickly.
Then schools should pay for it out of their pre-existing budgets, if its economic.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
They had to close an entire school near me recently due to Covid abscences. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic cost of that was more than £1000 / classroom in parental lost days of work alone. Plus the school itself would have been shelling out for cover teaching in the days leading up to it.
And that will be the exception and not the norm. My kids school that hasn't happened, and I doubt its happened in many places.
Were the Covid absences because people were too sick to work because of Covid, or because they had Covid and didn't come into work despite being healthy? If the latter, then it doesn't take any investment to prevent that, just go to work unless you're actually sick.
Either way, if people wish to make this investment from pre-existing budgets, that should be their choice. If they wish to let a teacher go and use the money to pay for filtration instead, that should be their choice. Their budget, their choice how to use it. No extra money though.
Budgets are not fixed, eternal things sent by God. Given there’s a once-in-a-generation issue (insert SNP joke here) with a pandemic, it hardly seems odd to consider how the budget might need to change.
And given that there is a tremendous budget deficit and a Cost of Living crisis, it hardly seems odd that trivial irrelevancies like filtration against an endemic virus are not a priority.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
I would not necessarily disagree with you on that though I do fear that it is possible we are regarding history from a high water mark and that things could easily slip back.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
Yes, we can never know if we at a high-water mark, hence we must guard against illiberal actions of all types (including the 'up their own arse extremists' who claim to be 'woke').
There would of course have been people 50 years ago saying things like 'taking away the liberty to refuse to let your B&B to homosexuals is going too far'.
And similar.
You can't be sure that people in 50 years' time won't think that people 100 years ago did go too far.
NB. It was suggested on here a few days ago that the Covid-19 hospital admissions were rolling over. Sadly that seems to have been a weekend blip - the rate is still climbing (although the rate of climb has dropped a tad - hopefully that’s a good sign).
Every metric is currently getting worse: people on ventilators, people in hospital, infections recorded. None of them are overwhelming, but they are sucking capacity out of the system.
Does anyone much still care about this? Haven't we moved on already? Covid as a pandemic is history, now its just an endemic virus that will have people going in and out of hospital for the rest of time.
I think we could be working harder to constrain spread, in order to reduce the load on both the economy as a whole as well as the NHS. Meanwhile the government appears to have completely given up on doing anything at all.
Ventilation & filtration appear to be very effective at stopping spread in crowded places & have the obvious side benefit of also reducing the spread of other diseases. Normalising masks for anyone that has symptoms would be sensible too. It seems like an open goal to me to work on these things. The Japanese seem to be managing it, why can’t we?
“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.” ~ Dr Ian Malcolm
You're right we could be working to constrain spread, but there's little reason why we should.
Other than the huge impact on hospitals and ambulances.
The number of Trusts that have declared emergencies is large. And, as it's endemic, this is not going to change. We're going to have huge pressures waxing and waning every few months.
We can either accept that (and give considerably more resources to the health system to sustain it long term) or do something to reduce the baseline load (eg filtration).
Otherwise we'll hear more and more stories about people waiting hours upon hours for ambulances and extremely long times in A&E, and dying or suffering long-term chronic changes that were avoidable.
That is not a good thing.
Everyone dies eventually. If people die they stop being on waiting lists and we have a new equilibrium. If people don't die then their needs only ever increase, they don't stop needing care or treatment.
If you futilely try and keep everyone alive forever, then you'll end up with a nation existing to serve the Health Service instead of a Health Service existing to serve the nation.
You're absolutely right its endemic and isn't going to go away, so its not going to change. That's precisely my point. People who want to put their heads in the sand and emerge when the big, bad virus has gone away are living in denial. Endemic viruses don't go away.
If people die, they die, everyone dies eventually. If the virus shortens the life expectancy of the very vulnerable then that may just be something we have to put up with, there's no divine right to have life expectancy only increasing.
Yes, we know everyone dies eventually.
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
Crisis has been the default standard for the NHS for decades. "Five days to save the NHS" was a quarter of a century ago.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
Well, that's okay then. We've had crises in the NHS in the past which have been, whilst crises, far less than this and transient.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Its always permanent.
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
Once again, for the apparently hard of hearing: this isn’t about cheating death. This is about taking simple, relatively cheap actions to mitigate a permanent (for the forseable future) reduction in UK GDP, due to the load of continuous waves of Covid infections.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If its cheap, use your existing budget.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
The whole sweep of history for the past 500 years, possibly more, has been a long march, with occasional diversions, set-backs and short-term catastrophes, in the direction of 'woke' - that is: equality, diversity, inclusion, acceptance of difference.
I would not necessarily disagree with you on that though I do fear that it is possible we are regarding history from a high water mark and that things could easily slip back.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
Yes, we can never know if we at a high-water mark, hence we must guard against illiberal actions of all types (including the 'up their own arse extremists' who claim to be 'woke').
There would of course have been people 50 years ago saying things like 'taking away the liberty to refuse to let your B&B to homosexuals is going too far'.
And similar.
You can't be sure that people in 50 years' time won't think that people 100 years ago did go too far.
I am sure though.
Separate question: When was 'far enough' for you, or do we still have further to go?
Comments
Nevertheless, we do choose to have a health service to reduce avoidable deaths and chronic pain.
I doubt you'd advocate abolishing the health service on the grounds that "everyone dies eventually," so that statement doesn't really address the point that our health service has been under incredible strain since the start of the pandemic, and now looks to be under "crisis" level as a default standard going forwards.
Because it's endemic. So it's not going to change. People who want to put their heads in the sand and say that it's all fine now are wrong. It's not. As will be seen when they or their loved ones get ill or injured.
And just because something's effective doesn't mean that it is good value for money. How many teachers would you be prepared to axe from the school's budget in order to pay for filtration? Or how many doctors and nurses would you be prepared the NHS's budget in order to pay for filtration?
If you're not prepared to axe something else in order to pay for filtration, then its just more comedy spending and not a real priority.
It seems such a no-brainer. As does adding improved filtration (as did improving water filtration and standards when we had issues with water-borne diseases).
My point is, as it has been: this thing is endemic and we're going to have to learn to live with it.
NHS demand will always be infinite. Demand only stops for the NHS when people die. Keeping people alive creates more demand for the NHS and creates a crisis ultimately in a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So if you're prepared to see some of the NHS's budget be cut in order to pay for filtration, as that's better value for money, then I'm fine with that. Otherwise, the NHS will have to cope as well as it can, with the resources available to it.
https://twitter.com/SuellaBraverman/status/1547516107518509057
If the Attorney General’s view is that the Rwanda plan is incompatible with the ECHR, then she needs to explain (1) why the government is maintaining the contrary in the courts and (2) why she let Ministers state that the necessary legislation was compatible with the ECHR.
https://twitter.com/GeorgePeretzQC/status/1547545409412808705
https://twitter.com/suellabraverman/status/1547516107518509057
It is endemic, we need to live with it. If you want to cut something else to pay for filtration, I'm all ears, but if you don't, then its not a priority.
(Hint: it won't)
And he is from these shores, so it is hardly surprising he gets the most attention.
Lots of things can happen that appear unthinkable. For instance, the widespread acceptable of trans people.
It seemed impossible, in the wake of the Brexit vote, that the UK could become woke in the way it has.
The support for net zero was impossible to foresee. A few years previously David Cameron was cutting the 'green crap'.
It was very difficult to foresee how much support there would be for Ukraine against Russia.
The other thing, is that all these changes seem to emerge at considerable pace.
However, it takes only a vague grasp of history to understand that change doesn't all go in one direction.
It swings in different, often random, directions.
Which means it's okay to have a far worse crisis lasting forever.
Okay, we're clear. All crises are the same, so a really bad and permanent one is the same as a far lesser and transient one.
Meanwhile, in the US, they are (were) trying this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_Governance_Board
How do you propose to end a permanent crisis other than the fact that people die at the end of their life? If you keep people alive, as their minds and bodies are failing, then the NHS has infinite and growing demands place upon it. Demand doesn't end until people die.
For the resources we have, we should keep people alive and comfortable as well as we can, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking we can cheat death. We can't.
What this is about, is mild to mod depression. Antidepressants don't out perform placebo but they are the only cost effective way of getting rid of the patient. So why fill him/her and the environment with SSRIs when you can fill them with the millionth essence of camomile?
That went in the mid 19th Century.
It hasn't returned despite someone's best efforts.
...
Change upsets people.
It's not exactly a flasher Mac. Though I guess sheep might argue that Paddington is going commando, plus those dodgy wellies which he seems to have lost in this presentation.
RU sure someone isn't winding you up?
How do we pay for filtration? We borrow money to invest. Doing so will reduce future healthcare costs and future hits to productivity.
This war is hideous. The Russians need to be stopped.
In any case, I'm on board with the idea of Patel as a hypocrite. However, the idea that restriction of free speech is coming from the right is a complete fantasy.
Its perverted behaviour
If it were a real priority you could be prepared to say let so many nurses etc go, we won't need them if we have filtration, but you don't. You just want to have your cake and eat it too. Bollocks to that.
The NHS has a budget. Its far too much already. Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care, NHS care, pensions etc is already destroying the economy as it is and your solution is to pour even more fuel on the fire?
No. This is terrible economics, demand is infinite when the price is nothing, you need to be able to reach an equilibrium. Use the NHS budget as wisely as we can, and anyone who dies won't be demanding NHS care, social care or pensions anymore. A new equilibrium will be reached.
Zahawi - two-faced slimeball
Braverman - nazi
Truss - vacuous (& supported by JRM & Nads)
Sunak - second hand car salesman
Hunt - drip
Tugendhat - boring
Badenoch - unknown
Mourdant - non-entity
On 28 August 2021 Ismail Abedi was questioned by police under counter terror laws at Manchester Airport while trying to leave the country. He indicated he would come back in September and was released.
He returned to the airport the following day and was able to fly out of the UK and has not returned since.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-manchester-62162594
Not. Gonna. Happen.
Apply for the Chiltern Hundreds, Boris, as soon as we have two candidates to go to the membership. You'll enjoy life far more, rather than some frankly mad delusion that you aren't done yet. Spoiler - you are.
Everyone is mortal. I'm OK with that.
I have no desire to be immortal. I have no idea to be kept alive forever while my mind and body are failing.
But I think what bothers myself and others now is that some of what we are seeing self-described as 'woke' is no longer following that trajectory. In fact it is a concept that is being used for exactly the opposite purpose - to promote intolerance and suppress difference. I am not convinced that women are well served by the current direction of the trans debate and nor do I believe that promoting the concept that people should be protected from hearing things they don't like or which might upset them is a useful direction for either the individual or society as a whole to travel.
The gender is only a sexist 1950s assumption by Michael Bond.
If it isn't, they shouldn't.
A thousand pounds sounds like a terrible, terrible investment from my back of a fag paper calculations. Unless teachers and supply teachers are paid way, way more than I thought, maybe avoiding a teacher being off for 2-3 days if you're lucky doesn't sound like its worth a thousand pounds. Especially when the teacher almost certainly will still catch it from someone else in the community anyway, its probably just burning a thousand pounds per room for no return at all.
(I personally believe that for, eg, a school the cost of dropping a box filter in each class & renewing the filters for a year will be much less than the cost of the lost staff time due to illness gained back. For a school that’s a direct cost as well, not a hypothetical one as they have to employ cover teachers to step in for those who are off ill.)
The government could easily be nudging employers & public transport in this direction.
Basically it's a simple idea that falls apart when you see how schools work..
Edit to add - that figure of course excludes insurance for supply teachers which may depending on the policy extend that 5-6 days to 5-120 days as it often kicks in after 5 days of absence.
The current (and I say current because most reasonable people accept Trans people should be treated the same as everyone else) Trans issue, or claiming that white people have inalienable guilt, is controversial because it doesn't fit into this pattern. The idea that somebody can turn up and say not only "I'm a woman" but also demand that language be changed to get rid of words like woman and instead say "birthing person" or "person who bleeds" strikes many people as fundamentally unfair.
If you want to dispute the first paragraph, then I say look to the Middle East (and indeed many parts of Africa and Asia) where the societies are not based on such principles. It's fair to say that there has not been an acceptance of these principles and, in some cases (e.g. the Middle East when you compare it with the days of the Ottoman Empire or 1950s / 60s Egypt / Syria / Iran etc), there has been a regression.
And therein lies the difference between this agenda and old style liberalism.
The NHS’s budget is pretty comparable with other developed countries, a bit lower than average perhaps. The UK share of GDP spent on health is much lower than, say, in the US. So, while I gather you think the NHS budget is too high, I am happy to see it increased, as are many voters.
Public health measures like air filtration in school protect the health of the working age population and are good for the economy. I don’t see the relevance of your comments about “Keeping the cripplingly sick alive in order to continue getting social care”.
My suggestion for where to make savings would be closer international cooperation to reduce trade barriers and to go after the multinationals who avoid paying taxes with complex schemes moving money between countries.
Meanwhile Tommy Tug has reportedly had a good day. It would be something wouldn’t it if Truss finishes below not only Kemi but also TT later. Not beyond the realms of possibility.
https://twitter.com/christopherhope/status/1547531212973023233?s=21&t=wRs2RmzEkgUuOMark-ay4w
As someone who campaigned for remain; what became clear to me at the time of Brexit was that if you go and talk to ordinary people, their views were very much at odds with the urban liberal elite who dominate the production of culture. I suspect that, to at least some extent, a similar thing is going on with woke.
Just get the virus and get on with your life. But if a school thinks its worthwhile they absolutely should be allowed to use their own budget to spend as they please, no extra budget for it though.
But you seem very reluctant to admit that. If you need to create a strawman to hit, then your position is not that strong to begin with.
There would of course have been people 50 years ago saying things like 'taking away the liberty to refuse to let your B&B to homosexuals is going too far'.
And similar.
With the cost of energy I suspect even that isn't the case this year and most schools will be running deficits while hoping the cost of energy returns to normal levels next year.
Were the Covid absences because people were too sick to work because of Covid, or because they had Covid and didn't come into work despite being healthy? If the latter, then it doesn't take any investment to prevent that, just go to work unless you're actually sick.
Either way, if people wish to make this investment from pre-existing budgets, that should be their choice. If they wish to let a teacher go and use the money to pay for filtration instead, that should be their choice. Their budget, their choice how to use it. No extra money though.
The only way to reduce demand in the NHS is to accept death. Dead people don't demand NHS care.
If you're not willing to accept death, then demand is infinite but the NHS's resources aren't. So manage the resources as well as you can, pick your priorities and go for that.
And he was in a very male prison in the movie.
The first woman allowed in the Stock exchange was in the 1970s
In the early 70s, women were allowed to apply for a mortgage for the first time
Sex discrimination was still legal until 1976
1980 - women were finally able to apply for credit cards by themselves
In the 90s we were finally allowed to deal with our own tax affairs instead of having our male relatives do it.
In the 90s, rape within marriage became an offence and I remember the howls of outrage from many (usually older) men.
Pubs could refuse to serve women until 1982
I have posted the stuff that happened in my own lifetime. Now ask me why I am not keen on rolling back hard won freedoms, on why I am sympathetic to "Woke"
And think how YOU would have felt if the above list was happening to you simply because of who you were.
I actually agree with you that we can’t save the very old & sad as it is, covid is going to reduce their life expectancy & apart from vaccination there’s not much we can do about that because they’re probably going to get covid.
But I disagree entirely that that means we should do nothing. Covid is a public health issue - it degrades the entire nation & there are things we could be doing that reduce that impact.
But people just like you in government are bored with Covid & want to “put it behind us”, so we do nothing.
If you can't afford it within your budget, then its not cheap.
Either way, it is what it is.
I'm glad people like me, bored of Covid, are in government. Good. We should be doing nothing, Covid is endemic, we need to live with it. Do what you can, with your budget.
Separate question: When was 'far enough' for you, or do we still have further to go?