Successfully reminding people that the LibDems exist.
Now, obviously beyond a certain point, this is a losing tactic. But I think it is a better one, for now, than the "prepare for government" approach of his predecessor.
Qiu et al. (2019), https://mednexus.org/doi/10.1016/j.bsheal.2019.12.004 : "Zhejiang Province in China has taken the initiative to establish a comprehensively integrated laboratory biosafety management system called SINS (Standardization, Informatization, Normalization and Systematization). The SINS model system has been introduced and adopted in 1,721 BSL-2 laboratories in Zhejiang Province,"
Credit where it’s due. Sacking LRM is excellent, one of the nastiest of MP’s.
I entirely agree that he’s a nasty MP who I disagree with in the strongest possible terms - but at this stage sacking him was up to the voters of Kemptown.
This stinks to high heaven.
No it wasn't up to the voters of Kemptown as it is up to the Labour Party who gets selected as one of their candidates.
They've left it very late to get involved and prevent him, and that is suspicious and may well stink to high heaven, but the democracy of it does not factor into it. It stinks or not regardless of that.
They have left these sackings until late to allow the NEC ( including Mish!) to impose hand picked candidates in seats. The Rochdale debacle and Jared O'Mara are evidence that this might not be such a bad idea.
Sir Keir Stalin is a bastard. If it upsets left wing princesses, that might be a problem for him, but I can't find the time to shed a tear.
So we have the Tories only one step away from announcing they are bringing back the death penalty, Labour arguing among themselves over Diane Abbott while unwilling to propose basically anything different to the Tories (pre GE plans) and Ed Davey acting like a clown from Cirque du Soleil....and a former PM going all Trump deep state on fringe podcasts.
Aren't we spoiled for choices.
Sunak vs Starmer is a huge improvement on Johnson vs Corbyn.
I have to say I am a bit baffled that PB seems to have concluded Dianne Abbott will cost Labour votes. She was very unpopular around these parts and was cited as a reason to not vote Labour in 2019 by several people.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
Was the bat soup on the menu in the lab canteen?
I still follow this argument even tho it is basically settled. The zoonosis people - the wet marketeers - have now “evolved” their argument such that if it came from the lab via a spillage, if a a bat pissed on a lab worker or a bat bit a cleaner who then went to the market, that now counts as a “natural origin” and they are still right, so the lab is fine and exonerated
Seriously. That is the latest contortion they are making to get their beliefs to square with the awkward facts
They are as bad as David Icke. Quite depressing that science has become so warped
But anyway. Tish tish: now I must abed in Moldova. Tomorrow, to the wineries! 🥂
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
I can't believe that anyone wants to seriously debate this anymore. The probabilities and circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming it reaches the realms of obvious.
The much more difficult questions are what are the implications of such actions by China? Are we confident that they have learned their lesson and will not play such games again? And can we ever forgive them for the millions of dead?
None of these questions have easy answers. Avoidance of them is the only possible justification for pretending that there is a doubt.
I am sorry to be disagreeing with you twice in one night - I do hold you in very high regard as a commentor and all round good guy.
But this was US-funded research. Gain of function research (experimenting to make diseases more deadly) was banned on US soil, so the programmes simply moved abroad. Isn't the real question a) Why on earth the US was conducting research in foreign states that was considered too dangerous to conduct on US soil, and b) Why was CHINA considered an appropriate location? Even if the research had gone fine with no leaks, the PRC would instantly know everything the US researchers knew about Covid.
Of course China made it worse, but it's pretty clear who is culpable.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
I can't believe that anyone wants to seriously debate this anymore. The probabilities and circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming it reaches the realms of obvious.
The much more difficult questions are what are the implications of such actions by China? Are we confident that they have learned their lesson and will not play such games again? And can we ever forgive them for the millions of dead?
None of these questions have easy answers. Avoidance of them is the only possible justification for pretending that there is a doubt.
Who knows what lessons China might have learned? Whatever, they cannot be forgiven for, at the very least, their obfuscations and lack of transparency
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
I can't believe that anyone wants to seriously debate this anymore. The probabilities and circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming it reaches the realms of obvious.
The much more difficult questions are what are the implications of such actions by China? Are we confident that they have learned their lesson and will not play such games again? And can we ever forgive them for the millions of dead?
None of these questions have easy answers. Avoidance of them is the only possible justification for pretending that there is a doubt.
Specifically, the balance of probabilities are: (a) it came from the market AND it originated like other viruses in its family; (b) it came from the market AND there was a conspiracy to send it to the market, or it failed in every single place it leaked to except the market. In my view, (a) is more parsimonious.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
Indeed. I think you can tell conspiracy junkies because they just spout outright lies to try to bolster their positions.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
And Muslim rape gangs tacitly ignored by the police and dominating whole towns. And don't get me started on stories about a rogue Japanese computer system leading to nearly a thousand wrongful convictions and the preposterous claim that respectable establishment figures headed by a c of E vicar with an OBE elaborately conspired to cover the whole thing up? As if.
Conspiracy theory theories are honestly not looking great just now. They are lucky to have the moon landing thing. Definitely a banker. But apart from that it's thin pickings. And does anyone seriously think they know for certain why jf and r Kennedy were killed and by whom?
Did I see Sunak was campaigning in Honiton and Sidmouth today?
It's the safest Tory seat in the country according to seat Electoral Calculus. Does he know something we don't?
Well the seats it is comprised from include one currently held by a LD and one where the majority was under 7k last time according to wiki, though in the usual course of events it looks like it should be safe even now.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
Well said, you responded to @Luckyguy1983 garbage I was tagged in before I had the chance to do so.
There is a reason that free market businesses around the country are going for electricity supplied to them rather than using diesel generators and its not a belief in net zero.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
Completely wrong. The Wuhan CDC - which also housed bats as part of the overall experimentation - is just 3 minutes from the market. I have posted the map a trillion times. I’m now allowed to post it again because of the rules. Ask @rcs1000 - he disputed this and I showed him.
Try this tweet
“One of the earliest papers on Covid-19 out of China pointed out the Wuhan CDC was 911 feet from the market and right across the street from the hospital where many healthcare workers fell ill”
The CDC was notoriously low level BSL2. It spent two years 2017-2019 moving to its new location right by the market. Ideal circs for a spillage
It kept bats
“The Wuhan CDC collected and housed many bats in collaboration with the WIV. It issued a contract for the disposal of 2 tons of hazardous medical waste generated in its labs in June 2019. This waste ‘has not been effectively treated from 1994 to 2019’, the announcement conceded.”
Its a very sad story, but why does reading a BBC article these days feel like I need a translator to understand what they mean but won't say. The guy killed himself. His family have said so.
Probably because the BBC (or any other media) can't report a death as suicide until and unless a Coroner has delivered that verdict.
More likely because the report is that he should not have been alone at work where he was robbed, and nothing about him being alone at home afterwards.
On topic: I had as my low point estimate for the election result as an 8 point Labour lead resulting in.a 20-30 majority.
I think with the polling variations, Labour's possible loss to the left of a couple of percentage points, but the Tory's failure to make headway, I still have the low point Labour lead of about 8, but I do not discount now that both those factors hit Labour's vote efficiency a little, because the Tories claw back in a seat efficient way and the left, comprised Greens, WPGB and, mainly, pro-Palestinian independents nick it in a dozen or so seats and influence maybe 2 or 3 Lab-Chin marginals.
A perfect storm at the end of the probability spectrum of polling failure plus left plus efficient Tory revival might just about leave Labour short.
It's not at all likely, I don't expect it, but I think it is now the extreme edge of possible. (9% probably overstates it).
Did I see Sunak was campaigning in Honiton and Sidmouth today?
It's the safest Tory seat in the country according to seat Electoral Calculus. Does he know something we don't?
It's not as safe as the notionals as they include 11% for Claire Wright the Indy who is not standing (and backs LDs). If we redistribute her votes evenly it's about 100th safest
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
Yes. All this.
I won't pretend to any certainty on this subject as it complicated. But the link I posted earlier shows that at the very best Leon's claims are riddled with exaggerations, which makes me mistrustful. He seems quite invested in one outcome because he thinks he deserves some kudos for calling it. Well, that may well be if he's right, but he's also painted himself into an unbackdownable position over it, and the shouting and exaggeration seem quite defensive. As though the flip side, being wrong, would be too big a reputational blow.
Hope everyone keeps in mind that the evidence is best assessed without reference to whether a forum loudmouth wants it to be true or not.
I'll repost this link because I think there's enough in there to show both sides that will allow anyone with a real interest in the truth to explore what things need to be looked into to really make your mind up: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
I just observed the labour candidate doing canvassing with about 4x canvassers. It seems very inefficient, lots of people walking around and not really knocking on any doors, when they do, people don't answer. It is exactly as I recall doing it 9 years ago in 2015. I find it really hard to believe this is how elections are won and lost.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
In case anyone just goes ahead and trusts you, the distance between the lab and the market is around 10km. To leak to the market, and to fail to leak in a similar way anywhere in between or around, is the challenge to the lab leak theory. You need to assume (a) they infected their own market or (b) it survived only in the market and subsequently spread in a way consistent with gradual growth during December, and in a way not consistent with a superspreader event due to the timings of the cases.
Yes. All this.
I won't pretend to any certainty on this subject as it complicated. But the link I posted earlier shows that at the very best Leon's claims are riddled with exaggerations, which makes me mistrustful. He seems quite invested in one outcome because he thinks he deserves some kudos for calling it. Well, that may well be if he's right, but he's also painted himself into an unbackdownable position over it, and the shouting and exaggeration seem quite defensive. As though the flip side, being wrong, would be too big a reputational blow.
Hope everyone keeps in mind that the evidence is best assessed without reference to whether a forum loudmouth wants it to be true or not.
I'll repost this link because I think there's enough in there to show both sides that will allow anyone with a real interest in the truth to explore what things need to be looked into to really make your mind up: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim.
It’s complete bollocks based on believing nonsense
Sunak campaigning in Honiton and Sidmouth today. Even the Electoral Calculus forecast of a Labour majority of 308 still has the Tories keeping H&S by 3%. This is a base vote strategy on stilts.
Why does Electoral Calculus take as its starting point the 2019 general election, and ignore not only the famous byelection which the Lib Dems won, but also last year's local government elections?
Labour are nowhere in this seat.
Only 2/3rds of it is part of the Tiverton and Honiton seat that was won at the by-election, the other 1/3 of the seat the Lib Dems polled 2.8% last time, and in the 2023 local elections Conservatives heavily out-polled the Lib Dems so that will influence the EC projection.
To be fair there was a big vote for the East Devon Independent Alliance and there is a sense that that group are Lib Dems in disguise, though they were still competing against the Lib Dems in the council elections and their main strength is in the Exmouth and Exeter East part of the council.
Is Electoral Crapulous actually influenced by local elections? I haven’t noticed any sign of it being so.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
I know of a manufacturing company with a bit of a problem expanding because the grid is at capacity on the edge of the small city where they're located. The company has recently invested in solar panels for the roofs of its factories, but it's own diesel generation is not even on the radar.
Voters who don’t think someone should lose their job for appearing on a podcast of someone whom others find objectionable. They give a sh!t.
Jess Philips, the queen of cancel culture, and a great example of the attitude a Labour government will have towards freedom of speech.
It seems pretty reasonable to me that Jess Phillips should have strong opinions about a senior politician who hangs out with someone who has repeatedly talked about raping her.
From the quote in the latter, it appears that the gentleman in question was talking about not raping her.
I'll quote the double down.
“There’s been an awful lot of talk about whether I would or wouldn’t rape Jess Phillips. I suppose with enough pressure I might cave, but let’s be honest nobody’s got that much beer.”
And really if anyone's going to be talking about attractiveness, it's not like Carl Benjamin is an Adonis.
It’s a joke, not a rape threat. That was my point. Perhaps in poor taste, but a joke nonetheless.
Truss is out to get Reform supporters voting Conservitive in the “Red Wall” seats, so why wouldn’t she appear on a podcast with 400k Youtube subscribers? It’s only the left who have this obsession with “sharing a platform”.
By all means Truss is free to share a platform with various alt-right figures who joke about raping MPs.
And we are free to form an opinion of what kind of person that makes her.
The quotes where from 2018, and as I said above, 2018 “Sargon of Akkad” is a very different person from 2022 Carl Benjamin, who’s no more controversial today than GB News, and has 400k followers on Youtube.
Should people not be allowed to be rehabilitated into society?
From Wikipedia: “In February 2020, Benjamin launched the group Hearts of Oak with British far-right activist Tommy Robinson”.
Here he is a few months ago at a Hearts of Oak event with another conspiracy theorist, Andrew Bridgen: https://youtu.be/SsRayGgi_4Y
Why, Sandpit, are you watching the output of far right conspiracy theorists?
I listen to his videos sometimes, usually at double speed because he takes forever to get to his point. That's why I know that Carl now is the same guy as Carl in 2019. I listen to The Quartering and Knights Watch too but mainly for unintended entertainment.
Why? Do you agree with Tommy Robinson and Andrew Bridgen as well?
No but I don't think that jamming my fingers into my ears helps my understanding of the world. Speaking of Bridgen, there is a funny one on Bridgen and his list of 'world experts' https://youtu.be/U1mHK7gBryM
You yourself said that “180 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute.” But you have gone out of your way to listen to his videos. That’s not not jamming your fingers in your ears.
Unless you are specifically doing a study of far right social media figures, I do not understand what you get out of listening to far right conspiracy theorists.
If you want to understand why people think a certain way, it helps to understand them, don't you think?
Yes, it does. I have found, personally, that it doesn’t take very long to get the measure of far right conspiracy theorists, and they’re all much of a muchness. I’ve also found that you don’t need to wade through the sewage they spew to understand them: you can read the analysis of those who have done that previously. It’s quicker and less unpleasant.
I have, however, for the purposes of research on this topic, just listened to a very recent 11-minute video by Carl Benjamin on Twitter where he outlines his political agenda. It’s full of talk of people of “foreign stock”, and the value of “traditional roles” for men and women. He explains how, “An evil will has taken control of the educational system”. His Twitter feed also had lots of retweets of Tommy Robinson as they’re at an event in London together in a few days time. It all confirms to me that he is a far right conspiracy theorist.
So, you did indeed benefit from watching it, as you are now rather better informed. (Of his views, obviously.)
I'm glad we've cleared that up.
I've never heard of him.
I dislike the phrase conspiracy theorist. It's for dullards. Conspiracies happen sometimes. One assumes people who like to call other people conspiracy theorist don't actually deny the notion of conspiracy itself. Therefore 'conspiracy theorist' as a value judgement makes no sense. It's like insulting someone by calling them 'a person who thinks it's another person's birthday'. A birthday believer. Or a person who thinks it's Friday. A friday freak. Sometimes it is Friday. Sometimes it's someone else's birthday.
Indeed the covid lab leak theory was initially denounced as a conspiracy theory.
Not just that. The lab leak hypothesis was a “racist conspiracy theory” and the scientific powers-that-be managed to silence it for a year on TwiX and Facebook. You literally weren’t allowed to talk about it, like we were all Galileo trying to push heliocentrism
Does anyone nowadays not think it came from the lab?
The lack of early cases around the lab, and the gradual growth of early cases around the market, are problems for the lab leak theory. I think you would have to believe that there were many unreported and suppressed cases, prior to any official knowledge of COVID-19 on the part of China, that were caused by the lab leak, and that China suppressed all the cases that affecting everywhere except the market, including the lab of course, which also had the ancestral properties of the variants of the virus traced to the market. This is the most plausible version I can come up with, and it is less plausible to me than a simpler theory around a market.
It’s just wearyingly ridiculous
THERE WAS A LAB 2 MINUTES WALK FROM THE MARKET MAKING DANGEROUS BAT CORONAVIRUSES
What are the odds? Seriously?? What are the fucking odds????
Of all the cities in all the world this dangerously evolved novel bat coronavirus happened to emerge in the ONLY city in the world with a laboratory dedicated to evolving dangerous novel bat coronaviruses
And the leakiest of the labs - BSL2 - described as “Wild West” be Jeremy Farrar (now head of WHO) - was right by the market. It leaked from the lab and was spread at the market. That’s what happened. We all know it now
If you look at the emails at the time, gouged out by freedom of info, all the top scientists at that time presumed it probably came from the lab. Including Jeremy Farrar. They just didn’t say it publicly because “that will damage science” and “cause a shitshow with China”
I can't believe that anyone wants to seriously debate this anymore. The probabilities and circumstantial evidence is so overwhelming it reaches the realms of obvious.
The much more difficult questions are what are the implications of such actions by China? Are we confident that they have learned their lesson and will not play such games again? And can we ever forgive them for the millions of dead?
None of these questions have easy answers. Avoidance of them is the only possible justification for pretending that there is a doubt.
It really isn't. There is direct epidemiological evidence linking the start of the epidemic to the market. actually in the market. While you can challenge the quality of the evidence there is no similar evidence directly linking any lab to the epidemic. The man whose blood was genetically sampled to identify the virus was a worker at the market.
There's also the requirement, if it was a lab leak, of two slightly different lineages of the virus to have leaked on different days to fit the pattern of the subsequent epidemic. Whereas this is normal when a virus has been incubating in an animal population before transferring to the human population.
The long article linked by @farooq above presents the evidence for both sides, in detail. It's compelling.
I saw some posts this morning about the cost of electricity, and some people were trying to tell us that net zero was going to make electricity cheaper.
Co-incidentally, I spent a chunk of this afternoon trying to sort out the electricity contract for work this afternoon. Business electricity is not subject to price caps, so reflects the real costs (unlike domestic pricing). Our site uses about 92,000kwh a year. The electric unit price is similar to current domestic pricing - we're being offered day rates of about 23p/unit. However the standing charge for our site has gone from about £5/a day 5 years ago, and £20/day two years ago to £29/day now. By the time you add the various other charges (eg 11p/kva capacity per day), the full cost for our site is about 35p/unit.
Where is all this extra money going one might ask? Basically businesses like us are funding all the net zero infrastructure costs.
I did the rough sums, if we bought a big diesel generator, binned off our electric connection and went "off-grid", we would save about £5k a year. Generating electricity with a piston engined diesel generator is a terribly inefficient way of producing electricity - if that's cheaper than supplying fairly large amounts of it to one physical location via an existing grid connection, whoever's running the grid have got it very, very wrong.
Now it may be that net zero is worth this expense; that's a political question, although dumping the costs on industry in such a way as to destroy our industrial base seems a particularly dumb way to fund it. But anybody who tells you renewable energy is cheap (i.e. our whole political class) is lying to you. Whilst the sun and wind are free, unfortunately the infrastructure to collect this "free" energy is very expensive.
An excellent post, and one that @BartholomewRoberts should read carefully before claiming to be a supporter both of the current direction of travel in the energy market and of free market principles.
I don't even support Net Zero, but the scenario that @Pagan2 is highly unlikely to be true, because diesel generators come with a massive bunch of compromises.
Firstly, does the generator support the peak load? It's easy to get one that will support your average electricity usage (and that's how people calculate things). But your average load might well be 30% of your maximum load. So to get it working, you may need to spend a lot, lot more than you thought on a generator.
Secondly, at a basic efficiency level, diesel generators are - what - c. 35% efficient. But when under load, that can easily drop to 25%. And then there's maintenance. There's regular thermal expansion and contraction, and there's going to be a lot of wear and tear.
Thirdly, there's hassle. You need to get the diesel to you, and you need to store it. And that is going to cost you both time and money.
If you assume that your only costs are fuel, and that your generator runs at optimal efficiency all the time, you *might* get to £5k/annual saving. But even that is slightly bullshit, because domestic electricity prices lag wholesale ones, while the cost of diesel moves very quickly in line with the world market. And that's before capital cost and maintenance. And you don't even get hot water as a byproduct.
Anyone who thinks they are going to save money by going off grid with a diesel generator is incapable of basic mathematics.
I wasn't suggesting I would actually go and buy us a diesel generator; as you point out, there are various irritations like having to take it offline to service it, and also a bit of capex cost (although tbh, I could find one secondhand that would do our peak load for about £10k - servicing would be under £1k/year, so we'd be ahead by year 3). I sadly don't have any real use for several megawatts worth of hot water a year (you do get free heat out of a diesel, exactly the same as a gas engine, just stick a flat plate heat exchanger in the coolant return between the engine and the cooler group, and help yourself), if I did it would be quite economic!
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
The fact that its even remotely competitive is because gas prices have shot up and we're using gas so that's what you're paying for. Its got nothing to do with net zero policies.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
Your second paragraph - even if we had a fully green power supply in the UK, the price of electricity is set by global markets. That's why my "100% renewable tariff" still went through the roof.
It's a flaw in both the argument for more domestic oil and gas production and for more renewables in the UK. The government need to come up with a mechanism to link the use of domestic renewables (or even gas, if you're that way inclined) to lower or at least more stable electricity prices.
They've just had an Orthodox Rabbi on Ch4 saying who has known Diane Abbott for many years and said there is nothing racist or anti semitic about her. He said "Starmer has no compassion. None at all".
He's right. He's behaved like a little man scared to death of someone with a following and a notable history.
Oh Roger. It sounds like you are happy to stay true to ideology, dispense with pragmatism and give the Tories another five years. Bless you!
You're right of course. I'll get myself some pin ups of Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees Mogg to remind myself what the alternative looks like.
Just a pity that when Starmer is such a certainty he doesn't try being a little braver and remember that though we want to win but we also want to be the good guys
Sunak campaigning in Honiton and Sidmouth today. Even the Electoral Calculus forecast of a Labour majority of 308 still has the Tories keeping H&S by 3%. This is a base vote strategy on stilts.
They know the game is up. You’re right. Base vote strategy
I mean that's been blindingly obvious since Natty Serves. 30 - 33% strategy
What’s all this Natty Serves bollocks ?
The kids is calling it Natty Serves innit bruv
Nobody is calling it that except the weirdos on the internet
Comments
Qiu et al. (2019), https://mednexus.org/doi/10.1016/j.bsheal.2019.12.004 : "Zhejiang Province in China has taken the initiative to establish a comprehensively integrated laboratory biosafety management system called SINS (Standardization, Informatization, Normalization and Systematization). The SINS model system has been introduced and adopted in 1,721 BSL-2 laboratories in Zhejiang Province,"
Sir Keir Stalin is a bastard. If it upsets left wing princesses, that might be a problem for him, but I can't find the time to shed a tear.
Seriously. That is the latest contortion they are making to get their beliefs to square with the
awkward facts
They are as bad as David Icke. Quite depressing that science has become so warped
But anyway. Tish tish: now I must abed in Moldova. Tomorrow, to the wineries! 🥂
But this was US-funded research. Gain of function research (experimenting to make diseases more deadly) was banned on US soil, so the programmes simply moved abroad. Isn't the real question
a) Why on earth the US was conducting research in foreign states that was considered too dangerous to conduct on US soil, and
b) Why was CHINA considered an appropriate location? Even if the research had gone fine with no leaks, the PRC would instantly know everything the US researchers knew about Covid.
Of course China made it worse, but it's pretty clear who is culpable.
It's the safest Tory seat in the country according to seat Electoral Calculus. Does he know something we don't?
NEW THREAD
Conspiracy theory theories are honestly not looking great just now. They are lucky to have the moon landing thing. Definitely a banker. But apart from that it's thin pickings. And does anyone seriously think they know for certain why jf and r Kennedy were killed and by whom?
My point was more that there should be massive economies of scale in generating electricity at grid level and supplying it to industry as required. Apart from anything else, powerstation gas turbines are a lot more efficient than relatively small diesel piston engines.
10 years ago, I'm fairly confident that running my own genset would have been significantly more expensive than a mains electric connection. The fact that it's now even remotely competitive is a massive red flag that our net zero policies are costing us an awful lot of money, mostly by slight of hand, and proof that all the politicians lining up to say that renewables are saving us money are lying to us.
There is a reason that free market businesses around the country are going for electricity supplied to them rather than using diesel generators and its not a belief in net zero.
Try this tweet
“One of the earliest papers on Covid-19 out of China pointed out the Wuhan CDC was 911 feet from the market and right across the street from the hospital where many healthcare workers fell ill”
https://x.com/0ddette/status/1793652838641422672?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Or try this. Look at the locations
https://x.com/ayjchan/status/1654218534640300032?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
https://x.com/scottburke777/status/1493682712510615552?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
The CDC was notoriously low level BSL2. It spent two years 2017-2019 moving to its new location right by the market. Ideal circs for a spillage
It kept bats
“The Wuhan CDC collected and housed many bats in collaboration with the WIV. It issued a contract for the disposal of 2 tons of hazardous medical waste generated in its labs in June 2019. This waste ‘has not been effectively treated from 1994 to 2019’, the announcement conceded.”
https://x.com/mattwridley/status/1630863112411783170?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
You’ve lost the argument. Its done. Yet you’re still trotting out these pathetic lies like no one can read or look at a map. It came from the lab
I think with the polling variations, Labour's possible loss to the left of a couple of percentage points, but the Tory's failure to make headway, I still have the low point Labour lead of about 8, but I do not discount now that both those factors hit Labour's vote efficiency a little, because the Tories claw back in a seat efficient way and the left, comprised Greens, WPGB and, mainly, pro-Palestinian independents nick it in a dozen or so seats and influence maybe 2 or 3 Lab-Chin marginals.
A perfect storm at the end of the probability spectrum of polling failure plus left plus efficient Tory revival might just about leave Labour short.
It's not at all likely, I don't expect it, but I think it is now the extreme edge of possible. (9% probably overstates it).
I won't pretend to any certainty on this subject as it complicated. But the link I posted earlier shows that at the very best Leon's claims are riddled with exaggerations, which makes me mistrustful.
He seems quite invested in one outcome because he thinks he deserves some kudos for calling it. Well, that may well be if he's right, but he's also painted himself into an unbackdownable position over it, and the shouting and exaggeration seem quite defensive. As though the flip side, being wrong, would be too big a reputational blow.
Hope everyone keeps in mind that the evidence is best assessed without reference to whether a forum loudmouth wants it to be true or not.
I'll repost this link because I think there's enough in there to show both sides that will allow anyone with a real interest in the truth to explore what things need to be looked into to really make your mind up: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-rootclaim.
Had we got a net zero power supply before this crisis began then our prices would have remained stable rather than shooting up when gas became expensive.
There's also the requirement, if it was a lab leak, of two slightly different lineages of the virus to have leaked on different days to fit the pattern of the subsequent epidemic. Whereas this is normal when a virus has been incubating in an animal population before transferring to the human population.
The long article linked by @farooq above presents the evidence for both sides, in detail. It's compelling.
It's a flaw in both the argument for more domestic oil and gas production and for more renewables in the UK. The government need to come up with a mechanism to link the use of domestic renewables (or even gas, if you're that way inclined) to lower or at least more stable electricity prices.
Just a pity that when Starmer is such a certainty he doesn't try being a little braver and remember that though we want to win but we also want to be the good guys