That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
What I meant by "nothing else" is the circumstantial evidence relating to the work being undertaken by the lab in Wuhan, the nature of that work and its close alignment with the Covid virus and the opportunities that arose for a leak to break into the wet market.
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
Fair enough. I think a lab leak is looking pretty likely. The bigger question is artificially enhanced virus escaping, or natural virus. I think I tend to the latter, but I wouldn’t rule out the former. I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Yes.
Until Liz Truss every new leader experienced a polling lift.
Once again this is verifiable through polling and is therefore objective.
I really do hope that the closer to the next election we get those (like me) with firm desires will learn to bracket out [ ] their own beliefs in favour of as objective an analysis as possible. Not always possible but at least strive for it. This place is at its best when it's not a strident bear pit. Leave that to the likes of Guido Fawkes and Elon Musk's latest plaything.
We won't be in a position to judge the Rishi effect until late November. Both May and Johnson peaked and plateaued after about a month with Johnson getting a second bounce after 3 months into the election
A Harry Potter-themed formal at Girton College has been cancelled after concerns were raised over the event’s inclusivity, due to its association with the book series’ author, J.K. Rowling....
Initial concerns were raised over the Harry Potter formal on the anonymous submissions page Girthfessions, with one user calling the planned event “inherently transphobic”.
After such concerns emerged, the College’s JCR committee emailed students apologising for any upset caused by the association with Rowling, stating its commitment to creating a safe space for the LGBT+ community, and assuring students that the author would not be profiting in any way from the event.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
Polish the Ban Hammer for action!
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
It's interesting that Russian trolls seem to encouraged to spout anti-vax nonsense, alongside the anti-Ukraine stuff. Is it because they have found that strong anti-vaxxers will like you no matter what so long as you say something against vaccines?
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
Trolls thrive on public ignorance, so any issue that has the potential to be emotional, as health always is, where there is a poor public understanding of the facts, are ripe pickings.
Plus an issue with Russia in particular is the fascist anti-intellectualism pushed by the elites in that regime. Facts are not on their side, so discrediting science, rationality, and the very concept of objective truth is a win for them. It's hard to criticise a regime or ideology from a factual basis when facts and science have been made partisan political issues.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
'Spending time in Asian food markets' imparts zero knowledge of virology.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
What I meant by "nothing else" is the circumstantial evidence relating to the work being undertaken by the lab in Wuhan, the nature of that work and its close alignment with the Covid virus and the opportunities that arose for a leak to break into the wet market.
Yes, nature can still throw the odd googly at us but it would be astounding if it just happened to do so where all of that was going on.
Fair enough. I think a lab leak is looking pretty likely. The bigger question is artificially enhanced virus escaping, or natural virus. I think I tend to the latter, but I wouldn’t rule out the former. I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
The whole concept of working on enhanced function of viruses seems extremely dodgy to me, why on earth would you do it/be permitted to do it? Obviously working on existing viruses looking for cures etc is reasonable work but why the enhanced function? It is a prelude to use as a weapon and it is unacceptable.
I would like to think that our Universities would not be doing the same and I hope the obvious warning of the risks of poor biosecurity have indeed been noted and acted upon. Some of what they might legitimately be working on would be dangerous enough.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
If you don't agree with me you're in denial. What a rubbish argument.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
If the Russians are going to make a baseless claim about us destroying Nordstream 2, then we should reply by blaming them for the ridiculous rise in the price of a Freddo.
Personally, I am shocked. Putin should be ashamed.
(1) We are not rejoining (2) We are not rejoining (3) It is possible we will have a closer relationship with the EU in future (3a) We are not rejoining
It's about learning to live with your mistake, or in the case of half of us,learning to live with other people's mistake. Once you have eliminated your best option you start rejecting your most damaging alternatives.
So Britain's destiny is Vassal State, I believe.. It takes a long time for people to accept that.
It will never be "vassal state" because Britain's raw geopolitical power is equal to or surpasses the top two EU members on their level, and that will tell regardless of the formal treaty relationships that have been established.
Were we an Ireland, Belgium or Denmark I'd agree with you.
LOL, Mr Jingo personified
I thought I might have spotted Casino in Tesco the other day.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
I wouldn't be seen dead in Tesco.
Imagine trying to tell you apart from a Labour MP.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Not sure about that, after all Sunak has still got a bounce compared to Truss and offers a dynamic fresh face and the first British Asian PM to the world.
However, I also agree he still trails and unfortunately there will still be a few closet racists who won't vote for him. Let us not forget even Obama never won most white votes in 2008 and 2012, it was the black and Hispanic vote that got him to the White House. If Sunak or another BAME leader can win most of the British white vote that is when we can say we really are a completely non racial society
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
Polish the Ban Hammer for action!
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
It's interesting that Russian trolls seem to encouraged to spout anti-vax nonsense, alongside the anti-Ukraine stuff. Is it because they have found that strong anti-vaxxers will like you no matter what so long as you say something against vaccines?
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
Interesting point. On the face of it, you'd expect the Russian trolls to be pro-vax, as don't they want Russia to look like the reasonable, rational, mainstream player in all this (and then smuggle the anti-Ukraine stuff along with it)? I suppose it shows that Russia's image abroad isn't what they're about.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
And that Senator Burr report (that is behind the Vanity Fair article) seems to be coming apart already. I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours. To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts: 1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes. In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…) this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
And that Senator Burr report (that is behind the Vanity Fair article) seems to be coming apart already. I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours. To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts: 1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes. In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history: https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…) this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
<1/2>
3. There is a rather odd comparison between the COVID-19 pandemic and the H7N9 flu epidemics in China The H7N9 viruses circulate in birds many of which are farmed and come into very frequent and close contact with humans and in China there's been at least 5 H7N9 epidemics from independent sources documented in the last 10 years https://www.doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(17)30323-7 this is a different story to SARS-CoV-2's essentially one-off spillover. The genetic data support that SC2 was introduced in humans in 2 spillover events, BUT these 2 events happened at almost the same time from a single host population source:
thus the comparison to different H7N9 viruses spilling over from farmed birds repeatedly but months apart is irrelevant (not to mention the date typos that make you wonder if anyone proof-read this report...)
4. My final point is about how similar our understanding of the SARS-CoV-1 emergence origins is compared to that of SC2, since the report makes it sound like we know everything about SC1 and nothing about SC2 origins... We recently performed a very comprehensive analysis to see, once you account for the complex recombination patterns in these viruses, how close sampled animal sarbecoviruses are to SC1 and SC2 respectively: The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 Jonathan E. Pekar, Spyros Lytras, Andrew Magee, Jennifer L. Havens, Edyth Parker, Simon Dellicour, Joseph Hughes, Tetyan… https://virological.org/t/the-comparative-recency-of-the-proximal-ancestors-of-sars-cov-1-and-sars-cov-2/906 what we find is that the recombination-free closest common ancestor (recCA) to each virus is basically of equal identity ~99%, while the whole-genome similarity between SC2 and its closest bat virus (~97%) is higher than that of SC1 and its closest bat virus (~96%)
All in all, this report cherry picks data and in many cases makes assertions that completely contradict the scientific facts and data that are available. It also provides no actual evidence for a lab origin of the virus (WIV just being in Wuhan is NOT real evidence of a lab leak) and contains plenty of political 'US vs China' discussion points (that imho obstruct the scientific search for the pandemic's origins). (2/2)
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
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We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Would you like to explain what you mean?
It's not remotely a honeymoon period - that requires there to be positive coverage. "Relief that Truss has gone" is not positive coverage.
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
So instead of a honeymoon bounce, you see Rishi Sunak slowly dragging the Tories back to towards 35% over the coming two years till the election?
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
The "Find someone to blame" mindset.
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
That happened 2000 years ago. We've all been mongrels since then, thank God. The ignorance of some racists ...
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Would you like to explain what you mean?
It's not remotely a honeymoon period - that requires there to be positive coverage. "Relief that Truss has gone" is not positive coverage.
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
So instead of a honeymoon bounce, you see Rishi Sunak slowly dragging the Tories back to towards 35% over the coming two years till the election?
The electorate is standing aloof, sucking air through teeth.
The remain to be convinced that the Tories have now got their shit together. That will take a goodly while. But it is not impossible, especially when compared to the offer (and the Front Bench) from Labour.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
Lefties keep talking about a "honeymoon period" which is just a sign they aren't paying attention. This is not a honeymoon period.
Isn’t it? Isn’t a new leader bounce a proven historical precedence?
Would you like to explain what you mean?
It's not remotely a honeymoon period - that requires there to be positive coverage. "Relief that Truss has gone" is not positive coverage.
Sunak has taken over in an unprecedented position of shittiness. Suggesting he's failing because he hasn't bounced to 35% overnight shows a lack of understanding of the circumstances.
So instead of a honeymoon bounce, you see Rishi Sunak slowly dragging the Tories back to towards 35% over the coming two years till the election?
Over the first month or two you'll see the numbers prepared to give him and his government a chance, numbers that may begin to peel off as events and the economy does its doings. Thereafter its events, economic stats, swingback, nurse clinging, drive for change etc.
(1) We are not rejoining (2) We are not rejoining (3) It is possible we will have a closer relationship with the EU in future (3a) We are not rejoining
It's about learning to live with your mistake, or in the case of half of us,learning to live with other people's mistake. Once you have eliminated your best option you start rejecting your most damaging alternatives.
So Britain's destiny is Vassal State, I believe.. It takes a long time for people to accept that.
It will never be "vassal state" because Britain's raw geopolitical power is equal to or surpasses the top two EU members on their level, and that will tell regardless of the formal treaty relationships that have been established.
Were we an Ireland, Belgium or Denmark I'd agree with you.
LOL, Mr Jingo personified
I thought I might have spotted Casino in Tesco the other day.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
I wouldn't be seen dead in Tesco.
Imagine trying to tell you apart from a Labour MP.
No self respecting red Tory would be seen dead in a Tesco either, Morningside Waitrose every time for Mr Murray. Besides, there he can glad hand all the Tories whose votes he wants.
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
The "Find someone to blame" mindset.
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
Happening already, on a small scale, of course, with Lyme disease in the States (expansion of suburbs into secondary forest IIRC). Not sure of reasons in the UK.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
If you don't agree with me you're in denial. What a rubbish argument.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
Trouble is that it involves getting beyond "there's a brillant arrangement that the UK can have if only it has the nerve to ask for it loudly and persistently enough".
Apart from a pretty small minority, my impression is that most people in the UK would like to have an arrangement with the EU which allows life to flow more freely between us and them.
What hasn't been worked out is what, if anything, the UK is prepared to give up or share to enable this.
One answer is "nothing", in which case you end up at the Johnson-Frost model of Brexit, which is going badly and causing Bregret.
Another is to more-or-less give up input into the rules, in which case EEA works fine. Or if you don't want Freedom of Movement, the May plan would have settled into the same thing in many fields. (Notice that Norway and Swizerland are fairly small, so had less potential input anyway, and have played the game shrewdly. They have autonomy on the specific things that matter to them, like fish, oil and banking, and calculate that that is worth being a rule taker in other fields.)
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
That happened 2000 years ago. We've all been mongrels since then, thank God. The ignorance of some racists ...
Some of us are part Neandertal from a lot longer ago than that!
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
The legislation is there because the offenders are already seeing some peiple as the wrong sort of minority. It is to make sure that that happens. It doesn't happen if you let people post notices in B&Bs saying thingfs like "No dogs, ***** or *******."
One thing that makes me raise my eyebrows at each of the "LABLEAK!" revelations is the way that so many things that were "dispositive" or "smoking guns" turned out not to be anything of the sort.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS "We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described. And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
There's a mindset that finds the idea of a lab leak less alarming. That implies that people (even if they're bad people) are in control of the situation. And provided the right people are in charge, all will be well. That we have the potential for sovereignty over the situation, so to speak.
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
The "Find someone to blame" mindset.
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
Not just someone to blame, though that's a factor.
How much is history about the doings of great men taking the steering wheel and forging a new path, and how much is it a billion microdecisions, most of which happen whatever the great men want?
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
Which seems to be the thrust of that article by Pankaj Mishra: don't let these people of colour be used as cover for what he sees as a regressive agenda:
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
Trouble is that it involves getting beyond "there's a brillant arrangement that the UK can have if only it has the nerve to ask for it loudly and persistently enough".
Apart from a pretty small minority, my impression is that most people in the UK would like to have an arrangement with the EU which allows life to flow more freely between us and them.
What hasn't been worked out is what, if anything, the UK is prepared to give up or share to enable this.
One answer is "nothing", in which case you end up at the Johnson-Frost model of Brexit, which is going badly and causing Bregret.
Another is to more-or-less give up input into the rules, in which case EEA works fine. Or if you don't want Freedom of Movement, the May plan would have settled into the same thing in many fields. (Notice that Norway and Swizerland are fairly small, so had less potential input anyway, and have played the game shrewdly. They have autonomy on the specific things that matter to them, like fish, oil and banking, and calculate that that is worth being a rule taker in other fields.)
I agree on the whole, but as I say none of what people seem to want points to the EU as it actually is being the destination, even the EEA is too close for most people right now.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Isn't that just a tad presumptuous - that the author's single motivation is the goings on in the British Labour Party? Maybe he doesn't give a stuff about Labour.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
All I'm saying is one party has a track record of passing legislation to combat racial discrimination and one has a track record of opposing it. It took until 1965 to pass the first Race Relations Act and until 1998 to pass the first Human Rights Act.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
All I'm saying is one party has a track record of passing legislation to combat racial discrimination and one has a track record of opposing it.
Yet the recent cabinets have been the most diverse in history. I don’t buy that it’s all figureheads as you say, rather it just isn’t important what someone’s background is.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
A new poster with no track record joins and starts to make divisive comments based on race?
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
A new poster with no track record joins and starts to make divisive comments based on race?
Say hi to Vlad for me will you Chris?
Most fascinatingly he didn't even deny it. Now we'll never* know.
(1) We are not rejoining (2) We are not rejoining (3) It is possible we will have a closer relationship with the EU in future (3a) We are not rejoining
It's about learning to live with your mistake, or in the case of half of us,learning to live with other people's mistake. Once you have eliminated your best option you start rejecting your most damaging alternatives.
So Britain's destiny is Vassal State, I believe.. It takes a long time for people to accept that.
It will never be "vassal state" because Britain's raw geopolitical power is equal to or surpasses the top two EU members on their level, and that will tell regardless of the formal treaty relationships that have been established.
Were we an Ireland, Belgium or Denmark I'd agree with you.
LOL, Mr Jingo personified
I thought I might have spotted Casino in Tesco the other day.
That's absolutely ridiculous.
I wouldn't be seen dead in Tesco.
That suit is a Lidl over the top, but it's scary to think somebody asda wear it Aldi.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
Which seems to be the thrust of that article by Pankaj Mishra: don't let these people of colour be used as cover for what he sees as a regressive agenda:
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
I am sorry but that is far too generous a reading of a disgusting piece of journalism. He also says this:
True readiness for such overpromoted Tory desis will consist in recognising that collaboration with white ruling classes or political passivity rather than struggles for social justice largely defines the history of the Indian diaspora, especially of its highly educated and upper-caste members. The over-zealous persecutors of refugees and the “tofu wokerati” today resemble, disturbingly, the Indian immigrants in A Bend in the River, VS Naipaul’s novel about decolonsing east Africa, who regard their Black and brown compatriots as the losers of history and escape to London to join its white winners. As one character sums up his bleak hyper-individualistic ethic: “The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it … I know exactly who I am and where I stand in the world. But now I want to win and win and win.”
It is not necessary or reasonable or appropriate to insult Conservatives who happen to come from ethnic minorities in that way. By all means disagree with the politics, but suggesting that these people are somehow betraying their origins by having different politics is repulsive.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
From reading that despicable article (I now need a bath) it seems its core argument is that minorities that go with the Tories are traitors and deserve all the opprobrium they get, including racism.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
They have gone a bit mad, not sure why the Guardian thinks this worthy of publication.
It would be perfectly fine to criticise Sunak for being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. It would also be fine to think his background should not be of interest.
But I really can't see how it is fine to combine his racial background with being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere.
Have to admit it is no better than we would expect from the Mail or Express sadly.
We’re having a productive day it seems. I wonder if Vlad’s been having a chat with his friend Ayatollah Khamenei who reminded him that the sly English fox is the invisible puppet master behind everything, controlling the Americans and even Israel. Perhaps the Brits are behind the genetically engineered robot mosquitoes too.
Unconfirmed: Reported to be APU USV drone footage of attacks on multiple RUS Navy ships including a Project 11356 Grigorovich-class missile frigate. BREAKING (1/2)
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
While I agree that a lab leak is entirely possible, it's the proliferation of explanations that it is 100% certain - many of them contradictory - that provokes the knee jerk reactions. And that has been the case since near the start of the pandemic, which is one if the things which poisoned thd debate from the start. The natural origins hypothesis equally remains possible - though the attempt to ascribe odds on either direction disaster more about one's biases than it does about evidence either way.
I've mostly (though not entirely) given up arguing with Leon in this, as it's usually a waste of effort.
Unconfirmed: Reported to be APU USV drone footage of attacks on multiple RUS Navy ships including a Project 11356 Grigorovich-class missile frigate. BREAKING (1/2)
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
Which seems to be the thrust of that article by Pankaj Mishra: don't let these people of colour be used as cover for what he sees as a regressive agenda:
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
I am sorry but that is far too generous a reading of a disgusting piece of journalism. He also says this:
True readiness for such overpromoted Tory desis will consist in recognising that collaboration with white ruling classes or political passivity rather than struggles for social justice largely defines the history of the Indian diaspora, especially of its highly educated and upper-caste members. The over-zealous persecutors of refugees and the “tofu wokerati” today resemble, disturbingly, the Indian immigrants in A Bend in the River, VS Naipaul’s novel about decolonsing east Africa, who regard their Black and brown compatriots as the losers of history and escape to London to join its white winners. As one character sums up his bleak hyper-individualistic ethic: “The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it … I know exactly who I am and where I stand in the world. But now I want to win and win and win.”
It is not necessary or reasonable or appropriate to insult Conservatives who happen to come from ethnic minorities in that way. By all means disagree with the politics, but suggesting that these people are somehow betraying their origins by having different politics is repulsive.
Not sure he's indulging in a betrayal narrative here; more like he's wearily pointing out that this is how posh Indians have always carried on. I read it more as a Marxist polemic against his own culture. It's an interesting perspective, and not a crude 'straying from the reservation' diatribe at all.
I've read before that Russia ascribe a level of subversive skill to us because they take James Bond a little too literally in being representative of what we can do.
(1) We are not rejoining (2) We are not rejoining (3) It is possible we will have a closer relationship with the EU in future (3a) We are not rejoining
Some of us are younger than you, so some of us might yet see it
I've read before that Russia ascribe a level of subversive skill to us because they take James Bond a little too literally in being representative of what we can do.
I assumed it was in part because they don't want to blame the americans for everything, so they publicly blame us as it is not so much of an escalation to accuse us.
Unconfirmed: Reported to be APU USV drone footage of attacks on multiple RUS Navy ships including a Project 11356 Grigorovich-class missile frigate. BREAKING (1/2)
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
That's a "standard thing" these days. They have these pseudo interview things that they stick on to other films, in addition to the trailers.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
The Peripheral on Amazon worth a watch (early days only 3 episodes released so far).
We’re having a productive day it seems. I wonder if Vlad’s been having a chat with his friend Ayatollah Khamenei who reminded him that the sly English fox is the invisible puppet master behind everything, controlling the Americans and even Israel. Perhaps the Brits are behind the genetically engineered robot mosquitoes too.
Nasser said “The sun doesn’t set on the British Empire because god doesn’t trust the British in the dark”..
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
The Peripheral on Amazon worth a watch (early days only 3 episodes released so far).
Agreed, I've really enjoyed it so far. And it is a lot more comprehensible than the book which I found not much short of bewildering.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
They have gone a bit mad, not sure why the Guardian thinks this worthy of publication.
It would be perfectly fine to criticise Sunak for being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. It would also be fine to think his background should not be of interest.
But I really can't see how it is fine to combine his racial background with being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere.
Have to admit it is no better than we would expect from the Mail or Express sadly.
Having just read it, I think its main thrust is that the author thinks Sunak is being too "white". Buying into Western values, education and expectations."Never mind that Sunak’s carefully trimmed career pathways to plutocratic chic make him resemble a human pinstripe rather more than the devout Hindu in loincloth – Mahatma Gandhi – who helped the sun set on the British empire"
I think the author is disappointed that Sunak is keeping the wheels turning instead of closing down Britain forever.
It feels like the Indian equivalent of "blue on blue" action.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
Which seems to be the thrust of that article by Pankaj Mishra: don't let these people of colour be used as cover for what he sees as a regressive agenda:
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
That message is not terrible, but he's done a good job of putting it in such a way that it will be easily ignored. A milestone might well still be historic and meaningful, without meaning other matters should be ignored.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
To be fair the first one was utter shit too. It's a rare sequel that digs its way out of hole that deep. Has there ever been a good sequels to really bad first film?
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
To be fair the first one was utter shit too. It's a rare sequel that digs its way out of hole that deep. Has there ever been a good sequels to really bad first film?
Top Gun: Maverick
As for the first movie, it was ok, I liked it fine, but it was weird to see people falling over themselves to declare how it wasn't 'just' a Marvel film. It was. Decent if you like that sort of thing, which I do, but it wasn't worth a Best Picture nomination. I mean, really?
Now beyond any reasonable doubt that the type of surface drones used by #Ukraine to attack Russian Navy in Sevastopol today were same as one previous found near the base. #OSINT
Don’t use the same IP addresses that are black listed as troll farms.
Polish the Ban Hammer for action!
[Edit: I see the Hammer has fallen]
It's interesting that Russian trolls seem to encouraged to spout anti-vax nonsense, alongside the anti-Ukraine stuff. Is it because they have found that strong anti-vaxxers will like you no matter what so long as you say something against vaccines?
I've seen it in a friend who would be normally passionately against Desantis and everything he stands for, says he is a "hero" just because she is anti-vax. And it is starting to make her receptive to all the other shit he says
I think they have based their profile of the British on the madder pro-Trump elements in the USA for whom being anti-vax seems to be a membership requirement.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Imagine if the first black Chancellor and the first Hindu PM had been Labour.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
Tories elect figureheads, Labour pass legislation to give rights to minorities. I know which one is more important.
Is it not better to see people as people, rather than 'minorities'?
Which seems to be the thrust of that article by Pankaj Mishra: don't let these people of colour be used as cover for what he sees as a regressive agenda:
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
Quite right. He clearly thinks Rishi is just the latest in a long line of oppressors both here and across the globe. And being brown skinned doesn't let Rishi off being an oppressor as they can be just as good at it (possibly better) as anyone else.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
Because Trump suggested it.
A perfectly good reason. If you dismiss out of hand 100% of what Donald Trump says you'll do ok. In a perfect world, unconstrained by other interests and obligations, you could maybe delve into each claim he makes and seek to discover the 1 in a 1000 that will be true. But, you know, time is money.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
To be fair the first one was utter shit too. It's a rare sequel that digs its way out of hole that deep. Has there ever been a good sequels to really bad first film?
Arguably The Empire strikes back was better than the original Star Wars. And Terminator 2 was better but neither of the first efforts were absolutely awful.
That Vanity Fair article is explosive. It came from the lab, almost certainly
What will this do to West/China relations?
What will it do to virology, and science at large?
Tony Fauci needs to go on trial and - if convicted - do time, as do many top boffins around the world who conspired in the cover-up - Vallance and Farrar in the UK, for a start - and many others
Peter Daszak and others close to the crime need Nuremberg Trials with potential execution at the end, if convicted. Twenty MILLION people have died. Worse than World War One
I have always believed that it came from a lab. Nothing else made sense. The question was whether they did this deliberately or by cock up. Cock up has always looked a strong favourite to me and it remains so. A further and more problematic question was whether it was acceptable for them doing this kind of research in the first place. To which the obvious answer is no. At that point relations do become more problematic.
Why ‘nothing else’? New viruses make the transition between species rather frequently. What do you is the origin of the original SARS? Or MERS? It’s possible it came from the lab, for sure, but asserting ‘nothing else’ makes sense is too strong.
Historical viruses were engineered by the Silurians in an underground basement in London.
Alternatively you could go for the "Intelligent Design" approach that a loving, compassionate god decided to inflict Covid on to humanity because he was bored making ichneumon wasps
Or that, as anyone who has spent time in Asian food markets will know, the transference from animal to human is a totally plausible jump.
Arguing with conspiracists and loons (like Leon) is a waste of time. They already get more oxygen than they deserve.
That last paragraph is the (very much non objective) type of dismissal that seems to characterise a lot of knee jerk reactions to the lab leak hypothesis.
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
Because Trump suggested it.
A perfectly good reason. If you dismiss out of hand 100% of what Donald Trump says you'll do ok. In a perfect world, unconstrained by other interests and obligations, you could maybe delve into each claim he makes and seek to discover the 1 in a 1000 that will be true. But, you know, time is money.
I don't think he ever says anything that is deliberately true, so it is somewhat immaterial.
We have now had 7 polls since Rishi Sunak took over. Here’s the average VI (compared to average VI in the last 7 polls under Truss):
Lab 51.4% (-1.6) Con 24.3% (+2.9) LD 8.9% (-0.7) Ref 5.2% (+1.2) SNP 4.4% (+0.4) Grn 4.3% (+0.2)
In other words, not much change. Certainly not enough to calm Tory nerves.
How long will the party wait without an upswing before they become restless again? A month? Six months? Certainly not a year.
A 27% point deficit for the governing party during their leader's honeymoon period should set the alarm bells ringing.
And that's with Sunak's personal ratings actually dragging up the Conservative vote. Those ratings date back to his actions with furlough etc, and I don't think they'll hold up after the economic entrenchment to come. Efforts from the person who was Chancellor for most of this parliament to dodge the bullet and claim that the economic mess is all Truss's fault are risible.
Nor do I think he has much political nous. For a start, he's standing in the way of the king taking up the invite to COPT26, at the same time as signalling a renewal of the restrictions on onshore windfarms that have all but killed off new developments. Unnecessary and avoidable own goals that will have already alienated any voter who thinks that tackling climate change should be a priority.
Sunak is a dead duck. In conversations ive had with people they say to me they dont trust him together with some aspersions to "that indian" This is a deeply divided country now
I think that says rather more about the people which you hang out with than anything else.
Not really i hang with normal people not the liberal left elite. Ordinary people dont want Sunak
Reading your post I would suggest you hang out with deeply unpleasant people
You're wrong. He doesn't hang out with anyone. The "some people say that..." is the "I think that..." when you know everyone will call you an arse for saying it.
You clearly dont know the british people like i do...many are fuming inside
Just tell us what you think. You don't like Sunak. Because he's brown. Am I right?
Im talking about the british people...people are saying they have lost their country
That happened 2000 years ago. We've all been mongrels since then, thank God. The ignorance of some racists ...
Some of us are part Neandertal from a lot longer ago than that!
I was just thinking that. We were all mongrels long before 2000 years ago. It’s kind of why humans survived.
The secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge is revealed in internal documents and correspondence obtained exclusively by The Grayzone.
The Grayzone has obtained an April 2022 presentation drawn up for senior British intelligence officers hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers. Almost six months after the plan was circulated, Kerch Bridge was attacked in an October 8th suicide bombing apparently overseen by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence services.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
They have gone a bit mad, not sure why the Guardian thinks this worthy of publication.
It would be perfectly fine to criticise Sunak for being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. It would also be fine to think his background should not be of interest.
But I really can't see how it is fine to combine his racial background with being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere.
Have to admit it is no better than we would expect from the Mail or Express sadly.
I read the article expecting it to be crap, but actually it's quite good if you ignore the fact that it's poorly written - but what else does one expect from journalists nowadays?
I liked this bit:
"collaboration with white ruling classes or political passivity rather than struggles for social justice largely defines the history of the Indian diaspora, especially of its highly educated and upper-caste members"
True, that.
A bourgeois doesn't have to stay where they are to be a compradore.
Doesn't have to be true. Just so happens that it is true. Not true about various other diasporas in Britain such as the Jamaican and Latin American ones.
Not true of every single person in the Indian diaspora either, of course, but Mishra knows that.
Suggesting the article is similar to anything that white racist organisations such as the BNP, EDL, or NF would publish is taking the piss at best.
We aren't joining the Euro. Therefore it's very hard to see the UK rejoining the EU in its present form. Beyond that, it's very difficult to predict the future direction of travel.
The EU is an utterly dysfunctional political body that can muddle through only by allowing a small elite to effectively run the show, and is riven with economic tensions that seem to be getting more rather less acute. There are all sorts of possibilities, and they should include scenarios where the EU starts to fragment further with the possibility of the UK joining a loose political association which includes one or more other former EU states, just as much as other possibilities involving rowing back on Brexit to some degree.
you describe teh dysfunctional UK and try to project it as teh EU, incredible and perfectly highlights why England is Fcuked and taking us down wit hit. Led by donkeys right enough and more Billy No Mates than ever.
I value my country's independence. You don't. It's time that you changed the question on the referendum that you want. Leaving the UK in order to rejoin the EU is not voting for independence.
A lot more independent than being a colony.
You no more live in a colony than I do. In fact I should be the one claiming to live in a colony, because where you live you have devolution and I have none. And you're not satisfied with that even though your party has 8% of the seats in the UK parliament after getting just 4% of the vote. That's in a real parliament which can properly hold the executive to account and make or break governments.
First SNP are not my party and second , PMSL, thinking Westminster is a real Parliament shows you have gone mad.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
To be fair the first one was utter shit too. It's a rare sequel that digs its way out of hole that deep. Has there ever been a good sequels to really bad first film?
Arguably The Empire strikes back was better than the original Star Wars. And Terminator 2 was better but neither of the first efforts were absolutely awful.
The makers of any sequel to the original Star Wars would be hard-pushed to make a film that was even half as toe-curlingly awful. That's one of the few films I've given up on halfway through. I just couldn't take any more of such garbage.
The secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge is revealed in internal documents and correspondence obtained exclusively by The Grayzone.
The Grayzone has obtained an April 2022 presentation drawn up for senior British intelligence officers hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers. Almost six months after the plan was circulated, Kerch Bridge was attacked in an October 8th suicide bombing apparently overseen by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence services.
The Tories on just 18% (!!) in the Midlands. Surely some kind of record low?
London Lab 46% Con 24% LD 12% Grn 9% Ref 9%
Rest of South Lab 52% Con 25% LD 10% Ref 6% Grn 5%
Midlands and Wales Lab 52% Con 18% Ref 10% LD 8% Grn 6% PC 3%
North Lab 55% Con 19% LD 9% Grn 5% Ref 5%
Scotland SNP 47% Lab 37% Con 7% LD 4% Ref 3%
(PeoplePolling/GB News; 1,185; 26 October)
Quite striking that the Tories are now doing less badly in London than almost anywhere else. Also that there must be quite a few southeastern Blue Wall seats on those figures where Labour are in reality the main challengers even though Labour supporters are used to voting LibDem tactically. What were the overall figures?
Lab 51% Con 20% LD 9% Ref 7% SNP 5% Grn 5% PC 1% oth 3%
Yes, already we are seeing some Sunak trends: Con doing comparatively less badly in London, Con collapse in Midlands, and Reform sweeping up the racist vote.
Where do right-wingers hear about Reform? I never see it referred to anywhere but here, and have no idea who leads it or what its main campaigns are about. The bland name doesn't sound especially racist or right-wing, sop it's not spontaneous enthusiasm for something like Britain First. Getting 7% must mean that they are getting significant coverage, surely?
GB news , comments in youtube videos from GB news, Farage , etc .Leader (Richard Tice ) interviewed a lot on these types of shows. Its also not a racist party so would not have a nationalistic name
While ReFuk is not a racist party, it will be a safe haven for closet racists deserting the Sunak-led Tory Party.
It will be interesting to see just how many of them there are.
(Too many)
While Ref might not be explicitly racist, you have to ask yourself where else have racist voters got to go?
If we accept that a significant minority (say 5%) of the electorate are sufficiently racist to make it a key determinant in how they vote, and that a brown PM crosses a red line for them, where else have they got to go? The really racist parties are so tiny they have barely any candidates on ballot papers, so Farage’s latest bunch will have to suffice?
It’s all just guess work. I’m not sure anybody has conducted proper research on this.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
That new Black Panther movie must be absolute pants, just saw a trailer for it at the cinema which was of the actors saying how important a movie it was and how amazing - it's never a good sign when even a trailer cannot be made good, so they retreat to getting the actors to just tell us it is good.
To be fair the first one was utter shit too. It's a rare sequel that digs its way out of hole that deep. Has there ever been a good sequels to really bad first film?
Arguably The Empire strikes back was better than the original Star Wars. And Terminator 2 was better but neither of the first efforts were absolutely awful.
The makers of any sequel to the original Star Wars would be hard-pushed to make a film that was even half as toe-curlingly awful. That's one of the few films I've given up on halfway through. I just couldn't take any more of such garbage.
Return of the killer tomatoes was better than attack of the killer tomatoes.
The secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge is revealed in internal documents and correspondence obtained exclusively by The Grayzone.
The Grayzone has obtained an April 2022 presentation drawn up for senior British intelligence officers hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers. Almost six months after the plan was circulated, Kerch Bridge was attacked in an October 8th suicide bombing apparently overseen by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence services.
I've read before that Russia ascribe a level of subversive skill to us because they take James Bond a little too literally in being representative of what we can do.
British specialists helping the Ukrainian Navy in Sevastapol earlier today.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
If you don't agree with me you're in denial. What a rubbish argument.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
British National Party English Defence League National Front The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
Those saying that we will never rejoin or that it's not going to happen are, basically, projecting out of their fear that it might actually happen.
It's called DENIAL.
It might happen. I'm not stating that it will because no one can say for certain either way. But in terms of reasons why we might rejoin, and opinion polling, currently favour something better than Evens.
That's called being objective.
Have a nice weekend.
xx
If you don't agree with me you're in denial. What a rubbish argument.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
Bring back the King of Cakeism?
He'd like that, but really the solution is a political party willing to say if you want X you can't have Y. Hypothetically this is what the indicative votes should have done, instead they acted as a ratchet to the deal that people don't like.
Comments
I think a lot of scientists in the field probably are a bit wary about all this. Dirty secret - safety standards at Unis etc are not always top notch. Can’t comment on China, but the US has a history of poor standards leading to serious and fatal incidents at Unis.
lab leak hypothesis.
There’s nothing remotely improbable about an infectious disease leaking from a lab, particularly one where we know the biosecurity level researchers worked to was
not as high as you might expect. Remember this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_Kingdom_foot-and-mouth_outbreak
A lab leak, owned up to and forgiven. Lessons learned. Why people are so eager to dismiss it for Covid I really don’t understand. It’s not conspiracism in the slightest. Cock up theory does the job.
Plus an issue with Russia in particular is the fascist anti-intellectualism pushed by the elites in that regime. Facts are not on their side, so discrediting science, rationality, and the very concept of objective truth is a win for them.
It's hard to criticise a regime or ideology from a factual basis when facts and science have been made partisan political issues.
"The Furin Cleavage Site is unique!" ... except it seems now that a quarter to a third of coronaviruses have FCS
"We've found the fingerprints of genetic tampering!" ... except it turns out that it was trying to cherrypick until an apparent sequence was found, and that the "fingerprints" in question would not have existed if people had followed the "Golden Gate" method they described.
And now "The Republican Senate minority report says so!" ... which seems to me to be the weakest of the three "killer" ones to date.
My instinct was "accidental lab leak" to begin with, but the molecular epidemiology report (with two separate spillover events separated by weeks) linked with the conclusive establishment that the wet market was the epicentre make it look considerably less plausible.
Because you'd need two separate accidents, which would need for two separate infectees who went nowhere else in Wuhan other than the wet market both separate times (otherwise one or more of the many dozens of more likely superspreader sites would have been a second, third, fourth epicentre).
The reason is so they can publish on Russian media and social media that Brits were discussing the UK was behind the attack on Nordstream.
It is to sow discord.
I would like to think that our Universities would not be doing the same and I hope the obvious warning of the risks of poor biosecurity have indeed been noted and acted upon. Some of what they might legitimately be working on would be dangerous enough.
The main reason to think we aren't rejoining is that when people are actually asked what they do want they aren't clamouring for the EU. That only a third of the electorate want to be in the single market, nevermind the full EU, is pretty damning considering the headline polling. That suggests that even getting the UK back into the EEA would be a tall order. Which is a shame as that position would likely satisfy the most people.
Broadly the public seem to want a closer relationship with Europe, just one that doesn't involve the single market, free movement, the ECJ, etc. I don't what they expect the politicians to do about this "move closer but don't join anything" idea.
https://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/scottish-independence/ian-murray-union-flag-jacket-photo-result-few-ciders-glastonbury-1375948
Now PBers might disagree about the lockdowns etc we are united in being pro-vaccine.
These trolls do not know their audience.
However, I also agree he still trails and unfortunately there will still be a few closet racists who won't vote for him. Let us not forget even Obama never won most white votes in 2008 and 2012, it was the black and Hispanic vote that got him to the White House. If Sunak or another BAME leader can win most of the British white vote that is when we can say we really are a completely non racial society
English Defence League
National Front
The Guardian:
The world has watched in appalled fascination as the UK’s ruling party scrapes the bottom of its human resources barrel: it found there its first Black chancellor of the exchequer and then, to clear up his mess, its first Hindu prime minister. Yet exultant noises from India as well as Britain would make us believe that some historic milestone has been reached.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/oct/28/rishi-sunak-britain-first-hindu-prime-minister-destroying-tories-pitiful-vision-of-diversity
I had a read of it, and one key figure (Figure 2) that "proves" the origin of SARS-CoV-2 "had" to be a thousand miles away was misleading.
According to the person who created that figure in the first place.
Spyros Lytras: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1585846395814412290.html
" First things first, I was never consulted about this report or had any knowledge of it before the last 24 hours.
To my understanding this is a US senate commissioned report assessing the origins of SC2. Not sure who actually wrote it (don't really care), but they've done a very VERY bad job at reporting the science on this topic... here's some thoughts:
1. The report seems to assume that my figure 2 phylogeny is the single way these viruses are related, but this isn't the case. this tree is derived from only one non-recombinant bit of the viruses' genomes.
In fact, the GBE paper shown at the bottom of fig2 (but not referenced or mentioned in the report's text) goes into great depth about how important recombination is and how every chunk of the viruses genomes has a very different evolutionary history:
https://doi.org/10.1093/gbe/evac018
2. The report states how 'the earliest variants of SARS-CoV-2 were well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' and how this 'represent a significant break from the precedent of other zoonotic spillovers involving respiratory viruses', but this is largely misleading...one example of many other large-scale zoonotic human pandemics being very 'well-adapted for human-to-human transmission' is the avian flu 1918 pandemic and swine flu 2009 pandemic...I mention this since we recently discovered that a single amino acid change at flu's NP protein can evade an important human-specific immune response and that change has happened in both 1918 and 2009 independently: doi.org/10.1101/2022.0…
These 'human-adapted' changes however most likely happened in the respective animal hosts BEFORE the viruses spilled over into humans (with the earliest known 1918 pandemic sequences having the human-adapted residue: nature.com/articles/s4146…)
this is only one of many examples where changes that increase infectivity in a host take place before the host switch (if 'human-adapted' changes had to be engineered in a lab we wouldn't have any zoonotic pandemics anyway...)
So, the report is being rather disingenuous about how different the COVID-19 pandemic is to other historical large-scale pandemics.
<1/2>
The H7N9 viruses circulate in birds many of which are farmed and come into very frequent and close contact with humans and in China there's been at least 5 H7N9 epidemics from independent sources documented in the last 10 years
https://www.doi.org/10.1016/S1473-3099(17)30323-7
this is a different story to SARS-CoV-2's essentially one-off spillover. The genetic data support that SC2 was introduced in humans in 2 spillover events, BUT these 2 events happened at almost the same time from a single host population source:
thus the comparison to different H7N9 viruses spilling over from farmed birds repeatedly but months apart is irrelevant (not to mention the date typos that make you wonder if anyone proof-read this report...)
4. My final point is about how similar our understanding of the SARS-CoV-1 emergence origins is compared to that of SC2, since the report makes it sound like we know everything about SC1 and nothing about SC2 origins...
We recently performed a very comprehensive analysis to see, once you account for the complex recombination patterns in these viruses, how close sampled animal sarbecoviruses are to SC1 and SC2 respectively:
The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2
The comparative recency of the proximal ancestors of SARS-CoV-1 and SARS-CoV-2 Jonathan E. Pekar, Spyros Lytras, Andrew Magee, Jennifer L. Havens, Edyth Parker, Simon Dellicour, Joseph Hughes, Tetyan…
https://virological.org/t/the-comparative-recency-of-the-proximal-ancestors-of-sars-cov-1-and-sars-cov-2/906
what we find is that the recombination-free closest common ancestor (recCA) to each virus is basically of equal identity ~99%, while the whole-genome similarity between SC2 and its closest bat virus (~97%) is higher than that of SC1 and its closest bat virus (~96%)
All in all, this report cherry picks data and in many cases makes assertions that completely contradict the scientific facts and data that are available.
It also provides no actual evidence for a lab origin of the virus (WIV just being in Wuhan is NOT real evidence of a lab leak) and contains plenty of political 'US vs China' discussion points (that imho obstruct the scientific search for the pandemic's origins).
(2/2)
The idea that something dreadful like this can just happen, due to a combination of bad luck, stupidity and a bit of greed, that's a lot scarier in many ways. Because it can't be stopped, and mitigations depend on us all being less stupid and less greedy.
It is sad as it is predictable.
@SecGranholm
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This is a HUGE step in strengthening our relationship with Poland 🇵🇱 to create energy security for future generations to come. We are excited to continue this partnership to drive forward a clean energy transition with our counterparts in Europe.
https://twitter.com/SecGranholm/status/1586082584919912448
Yeah. I'd been reading reports on potential pandemics years ago, and they concluded we'd get more and more zoonotic spillover events over time as various reservoir species get pushed out of their niches and humans push in to their territories.
They've been expecting a big zoonotic spillover pandemic for a generation now.
Well, we have to imagine, in the same way we have to imagine Labour's first female PM.
This lashing out is partly at the embarrassment of Labour being almost half a century behind the Tories on diversity. The Tories!! Damn, that must hurt.
The remain to be convinced that the Tories have now got their shit together. That will take a goodly while. But it is not impossible, especially when compared to the offer (and the Front Bench) from Labour.
Apart from a pretty small minority, my impression is that most people in the UK would like to have an arrangement with the EU which allows life to flow more freely between us and them.
What hasn't been worked out is what, if anything, the UK is prepared to give up or share to enable this.
One answer is "nothing", in which case you end up at the Johnson-Frost model of Brexit, which is going badly and causing Bregret.
Another is to more-or-less give up input into the rules, in which case EEA works fine. Or if you don't want Freedom of Movement, the May plan would have settled into the same thing in many fields. (Notice that Norway and Swizerland are fairly small, so had less potential input anyway, and have played the game shrewdly. They have autonomy on the specific things that matter to them, like fish, oil and banking, and calculate that that is worth being a rule taker in other fields.)
How much is history about the doings of great men taking the steering wheel and forging a new path, and how much is it a billion microdecisions, most of which happen whatever the great men want?
But we should be in no doubt about what an immoral and inept political class wants us to celebrate: “Asian representation” leading a cruel Tory programme of mass impoverishment.
Agree or disgree with the politics, that call to look beyond just ethnicity is correct.
Say hi to Vlad for me will you Chris?
*we know
True readiness for such overpromoted Tory desis will consist in recognising that collaboration with white ruling classes or political passivity rather than struggles for social justice largely defines the history of the Indian diaspora, especially of its highly educated and upper-caste members. The over-zealous persecutors of refugees and the “tofu wokerati” today resemble, disturbingly, the Indian immigrants in A Bend in the River, VS Naipaul’s novel about decolonsing east Africa, who regard their Black and brown compatriots as the losers of history and escape to London to join its white winners. As one character sums up his bleak hyper-individualistic ethic: “The world is a rich place. It all depends on what you choose in it … I know exactly who I am and where I stand in the world. But now I want to win and win and win.”
It is not necessary or reasonable or appropriate to insult Conservatives who happen to come from ethnic minorities in that way. By all means disagree with the politics, but suggesting that these people are somehow betraying their origins by having different politics is repulsive.
Russia alleges British “specialists” aided drone attack in Sevastopol
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2022/oct/29/russia-ukraine-war-live-moscow-says-draft-completed-un-chief-appeals-for-renewed-grain-deal?page=with:block-635d25cc8f08d67823c481a5#block-635d25cc8f08d67823c481a5
It would be perfectly fine to criticise Sunak for being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere. It would also be fine to think his background should not be of interest.
But I really can't see how it is fine to combine his racial background with being a fan of austerity, rich and out of touch, metropolitan elite, or a citizen of everywhere and nowhere.
Have to admit it is no better than we would expect from the Mail or Express sadly.
https://twitter.com/UKikaski/status/1586347310153433088
Doesn’t look like it was lifted from a video game….
The natural origins hypothesis equally remains possible - though the attempt to ascribe odds on either direction disaster more about one's biases than it does about evidence either way.
I've mostly (though not entirely) given up arguing with Leon in this, as it's usually a waste of effort.
https://mobile.twitter.com/AndrewPerpetua/status/1586347071950721024
Among them is the frigate Admiral Makarov. There is a high probability that several ships are not just damaged, but sunk.
https://twitter.com/TpyxaNews/status/1586343729543057411
They are, as you observe "quite cringe".
I think the author is disappointed that Sunak is keeping the wheels turning instead of closing down Britain forever.
It feels like the Indian equivalent of "blue on blue" action.
As for the first movie, it was ok, I liked it fine, but it was weird to see people falling over themselves to declare how it wasn't 'just' a Marvel film. It was. Decent if you like that sort of thing, which I do, but it wasn't worth a Best Picture nomination. I mean, really?
Reference https://navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/09/ukraines-new-weapon-to-strike-russian-navy-in-sevastopol/…
And http://hisutton.com/Ukraines-New-Explosive-USV.html
https://twitter.com/CovertShores/status/1586358192178601984
The secret British intelligence plot to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge is revealed in internal documents and correspondence obtained exclusively by The Grayzone.
The Grayzone has obtained an April 2022 presentation drawn up for senior British intelligence officers hashing out an elaborate scheme to blow up Crimea’s Kerch Bridge with the involvement of specially trained Ukrainian soldiers. Almost six months after the plan was circulated, Kerch Bridge was attacked in an October 8th suicide bombing apparently overseen by Ukraine’s SBU intelligence services.
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/10/10/ukrainian-kerch-bridge/
The Russians are in a bind. They can’t grant the Ukrainian’s agency. It can’t be the Americans, so that leaves…us…
I liked this bit:
"collaboration with white ruling classes or political passivity rather than struggles for social justice largely defines the history of the Indian diaspora, especially of its highly educated and upper-caste members"
True, that.
A bourgeois doesn't have to stay where they are to be a compradore.
Doesn't have to be true. Just so happens that it is true. Not true about various other diasporas in Britain such as the Jamaican and Latin American ones.
Not true of every single person in the Indian diaspora either, of course, but Mishra knows that.
Suggesting the article is similar to anything that white racist organisations such as the BNP, EDL, or NF would publish is taking the piss at best.
If we accept that a significant minority (say 5%) of the electorate are sufficiently racist to make it a key determinant in how they vote, and that a brown PM crosses a red line for them, where else have they got to go? The really racist parties are so tiny they have barely any candidates on ballot papers, so Farage’s latest bunch will have to suffice?
It’s all just guess work. I’m not sure anybody has conducted proper research on this.