I'll ask you again. Is the term you used - 'petty white scum' - racist or not? I think it obviously is, and so you don't have a leg to stand on in criticizing what anyone else might say, because you only care about racist language as a political tool, not out of principle. If you cared about it in principle, you'd obviously never use it yourself.
Of course it isn't racist as several of us have set out to you. Are crayons required so that we can draw you a picture? You are defending petty white racists calling black people dogs. Are all white people petty? No. Do you have to be white to be petty? No. So we can discard the racism accusation. But what they were saying had no qualifiers, it was "blacks". And you are repeatedly defending them.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
Agree that's one explanation for why the UK has problems now that France has substantially solved.
My point was that Scott's tweet is valid. The difference between the UK and other countries is too stark to be dismissed as playing games with statistics.
France still has double the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and double the number in ICU than the UK has.
The UK will now be at or below average deaths for the time of year
Not sure hospitalisation and ICU rates are that useful as point to point comparison. Not all Covid 19 sufferers end up in hospital and not all those that die from it go through ICU. What we can say is that the deaths came down much faster in France compared with the UK.
The trend isn't our friend as far as the UK's epidemic response is concerned.
If that graph was done by date of death the the peak would by higher and the drop would be steeper. Our lack of drop is deaths is a statistical phantom.
Also, the FT charts (as above) are logarithmic plots of the 7-day moving average. If you plot their data on a linear chart, it would be an obviously higher peak & steeper fall - about a factor of 7 from peak to today.
(Log charts are good for observing changes in rates of change between widely differing scales, but are not good for comparing absolute quantities by eye.)
Reason why I selected Log scale was that the absolute numbers now are all down at the X axis because all countries, UK included, are well off the peak. Log scale means that differences between countries now is visually downplayed. The UK comparative situation is actually worse than it might look.
Daily Average number of Covid-19 deaths in the last 7 days (8-14th June)
In alphabetical order Belgium 8 France 36 Germany 13 Italy 63 Spain 0 Sweden 31 UK 165
You're not good at basic logic, are you? The Nazis were indeed racists, but 'Nazi' is not in itself a racist term, but a technical description of political party.
The terms used by RochdalePioneers, however - 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' - are intrinsically racist in themselves, and thus are not suitable political epithets.
This really isn't hard to understand. But now you've dug yourself into a deep hole of hypocrisy and don't want to admit it, so no doubt you'll keep digging...
Racism = power + prejudice. White people have the power so no pejorative directed at them is racist.
"Watch as I play with words to justify racism against the 'right' people"
Pisspoor. Just so so poor. And what a weak weak man. It's a bit pathetic, frankly, and one hates to say this about our PM. I do anyway, I much prefer to respect the person in that position, regardless of party.
Anyway bottom line. I was 'unfavourable trending better' and now I'm HIGHLY UNFAVOURABLE and trending the other way. Christ knows how low he can go. I'd rather not speculate.
Did you catch Dead Ringers this weekend? A review of life under the virus. There was a sketch at the end about Boris, Dom and Durham, which was uncomfortable listening (and I'm not a fan of B + D). Let's just say that having a chief adviser called Dom was made pretty near the knuckle.
Now, you might say that nobody's vote has ever been changed by any satirical production. I think the creators of Private Eye pointed out the huge success of 1930's Berlin cabaret. But sometimes unfair comedic images do stick; Maggie in a man's suit, grey John Major, Blair teasing Prescott for still being a lefty. And if BoJo's satirical image goes from Dulux dog made human to Dom's victim in a No 10 dungeon, that won't help him.
No I didn't see it but I know what you mean. That type of thing can drip drip drip and have an impact, fair or not.
I'm a bit too much of a sensitive flower for it myself. I never really liked Spitting Image, for example.
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
It would be about 240,000 at Cheltenham over the four days. (I was one of them, incidentally.)
Take your point though. Nobody is disputing the 'late lockdown' issue. The two sporting events were still wrong though. And there is of course a big difference between people returning of necessity from holiday and fans voluntarily attending a crowded football stadium.
Pissy man wasn't jailed for having a piss in the street. He was jailed for outraging public decency by pissing up against the type of thing he supposedly was there to defend. Yes he didn't know what it meant or who the memorial was for or probably how to get back to the rat hole he crawled out of. So what - you get that drunk whilst that stupid, there are consequences...
Crimes should be for what you do not what the Daily Mail thinks about it, there should not be an offence of "outraging public decency".
Perhaps - proposals have been made to reform these old laws which the government have chosen not to enact. The law is the law - he got done.
When you have an incredibly vague and stupid law, you should certainly bitch about the shitty governments that left it there, but you should also bitch about the cretin of a magistrate who chose apply it and turn it up to 11. It's not as if the magistrate had no discretion.
You are anti white, you liked seeing these random people being beaten almost to death, you didn't condemn it, you loved it, you're just a racist. Own it. Be proud.
Mods - there really are some dipshits on this board making the most absurd comments. I "liked seeing these random people almost beaten to death".
Pissy man did hand himself into the police early the next day, surprised that the quick admittance of guilt didn't help his case.
Firstly, it probably did help his case - I expect he'd have got a month otherwise.
Secondly, it sounds from the story as if he handed himself in because his father recognised him and told him to 'fess up or he'd shop the lad himself (and I applaud the father for that).
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
I'll ask you again. Is the term you used - 'petty white scum' - racist or not? I think it obviously is, and so you don't have a leg to stand on in criticizing what anyone else might say, because you only care about racist language as a political tool, not out of principle. If you cared about it in principle, you'd obviously never use it yourself.
Of course it isn't racist as several of us have set out to you. Are crayons required so that we can draw you a picture? You are defending petty white racists calling black people dogs. Are all white people petty? No. Do you have to be white to be petty? No. So we can discard the racism accusation. But what they were saying had no qualifiers, it was "blacks". And you are repeatedly defending them.
Amazing. What you said is 100% racist and your denials are laughable. You could easily have condemned the racist language you heard - which would be totally reasonable and which I would agree with - without using racist language about the perpetrators. Whose language, contrary to your repeated lies, I haven't defended once. Feel free to quote an example where I have - you won't find one.
But you felt it wasn't enough to condemn racist language, you also had to use it yourself. Why was that?
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
Agree that's one explanation for why the UK has problems now that France has substantially solved.
My point was that Scott's tweet is valid. The difference between the UK and other countries is too stark to be dismissed as playing games with statistics.
France still has double the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and double the number in ICU than the UK has.
The UK will now be at or below average deaths for the time of year
Not sure hospitalisation and ICU rates are that useful as point to point comparison. Not all Covid 19 sufferers end up in hospital and not all those that die from it go through ICU. What we can say is that the deaths came down much faster in France compared with the UK.
The trend isn't our friend as far as the UK's epidemic response is concerned.
If that graph was done by date of death the the peak would by higher and the drop would be steeper. Our lack of drop is deaths is a statistical phantom.
Also, the FT charts (as above) are logarithmic plots of the 7-day moving average. If you plot their data on a linear chart, it would be an obviously higher peak & steeper fall - about a factor of 7 from peak to today.
(Log charts are good for observing changes in rates of change between widely differing scales, but are not good for comparing absolute quantities by eye.)
Reason why I selected Log scale was that the absolute numbers now are all down at the X axis because all countries, UK included, are well off the peak. Log scale means that differences between countries now is visually downplayed. The UK comparative situation is actually worse than it might look.
Daily Average number of Covid-19 deaths in the last 7 days (8-14th June)
In alphabetical order Belgium 8 France 36 Germany 13 Italy 63 Spain 0 Sweden 31 UK 165
Source Worldometers
Worldometer gets confused easily.
Spain are reporting 26 in last seven days but there are acknowledged problems in the reporting which is why I don’t think worldometers is being updated. I take my figures from RTVE.
Pissy man wasn't jailed for having a piss in the street. He was jailed for outraging public decency by pissing up against the type of thing he supposedly was there to defend. Yes he didn't know what it meant or who the memorial was for or probably how to get back to the rat hole he crawled out of. So what - you get that drunk whilst that stupid, there are consequences...
Crimes should be for what you do not what the Daily Mail thinks about it, there should not be an offence of "outraging public decency".
Perhaps - proposals have been made to reform these old laws which the government have chosen not to enact. The law is the law - he got done.
When you have an incredibly vague and stupid law, you should certainly bitch about the shitty governments that left it there, but you should also bitch about the cretin of a magistrate who chose apply it and turn it up to 11. It's not as if the magistrate had no discretion.
I'm in broad agreement. "outraging public decency" is an invitation for mob rule. Lets say this chap with the Stella overload had asked to be bumped up to crown court. A jury of his peers deciding what "outraging public decency" means. In febrile times like this its a problem. Hence the proposals for reform ignored so far by the government
It's sometimes interesting to supplement the anonymous polling data with a drill-down on how the Cummings scandal has impacted the opinion on Boris Johnson of a real person - e.g. me.
It's negatively, I have to say. Never liked or rated Johnson, disappointed our country would choose such a person as our PM, but I was warming to him. I was OK with the tone he struck with his early virus meetings, then he got sick, recovered and I was very impressed with his first video address fresh out of hospital. Moved even. It felt authentic. The first time I had been able to say this about him. So my 'Johnson rating' at this point was 'unfavourable' but trending towards neutral.
The scandal then broke and there was a Header on here which concluded that Cummings ought to go and that he would go. I disagreed on both counts. I thought he probably should stay - given his value to the government - and I never for a moment thought he would resign or be sacked. Armed with my new and improved opinion of Johnson, I assumed he would have the integrity and the political skill and capital to (i) keep his most important SPAD but (ii) make it clear to the public that there had been a reprimand and an unreserved apology.
Well (i) proved to be the case, but as for (ii) how wrong could I be? Instead of reprimand and apology what we got from the PM was praise - PRAISE - for Cummings.
"He acted as he saw fit in the best interests of his family and I will not mark him down for that."
Absolutely incredible. You could have knocked me down with a feather. On recovering composure, I analysed the matter and came to the only possible conclusion. Here you had a guy, the PM of this country, an 80 seat majority won just 7 months ago, who without this "Dom" character would be a lost little lamb. Such was the measure of his vacuity and laziness - the reliance on a SPAD to supply all the intellectual heft and drive at the top of government because he had none of either. A dependency so craven that not only could he not bring himself to criticize the rule breaking and rank hypocrisy of Cummings, he ended up praising it.
Pisspoor. Just so so poor. And what a weak weak man. It's a bit pathetic, frankly, and one hates to say this about our PM. I do anyway, I much prefer to respect the person in that position, regardless of party.
Anyway bottom line. I was 'unfavourable trending better' and now I'm HIGHLY UNFAVOURABLE and trending the other way. Christ knows how low he can go. I'd rather not speculate.
It just shows your lack of judgement earlier on. But no matter, plenty fell under his spell, don't beat yourself up about being one of those. Some are still there. Just be happy you are clearer now, albeit it's a shame it took a highly publicised incident to bring it home to you.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
I'm not sure that that is relevant.
Was the *effect* any different. I don't recall significant differences in fall in transport usage, for example.
There was a comparative graph from Google data on Twitter somewhere, and I can't find it.
UK's lockdown was certainly not far softer than Germany's. A bit harder (and quite a bit longer) so far as I can tell. No doubt there are other European countries that also had softer lockdowns.
Much softer than France, I believe.
And Spain, and Italy.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Pisspoor. Just so so poor. And what a weak weak man. It's a bit pathetic, frankly, and one hates to say this about our PM. I do anyway, I much prefer to respect the person in that position, regardless of party.
Anyway bottom line. I was 'unfavourable trending better' and now I'm HIGHLY UNFAVOURABLE and trending the other way. Christ knows how low he can go. I'd rather not speculate.
Did you catch Dead Ringers this weekend? A review of life under the virus. There was a sketch at the end about Boris, Dom and Durham, which was uncomfortable listening (and I'm not a fan of B + D). Let's just say that having a chief adviser called Dom was made pretty near the knuckle.
Now, you might say that nobody's vote has ever been changed by any satirical production. I think the creators of Private Eye pointed out the huge success of 1930's Berlin cabaret. But sometimes unfair comedic images do stick; Maggie in a man's suit, grey John Major, Blair teasing Prescott for still being a lefty. And if BoJo's satirical image goes from Dulux dog made human to Dom's victim in a No 10 dungeon, that won't help him.
No I didn't see it but I know what you mean. That type of thing can drip drip drip and have an impact, fair or not.
I'm a bit too much of a sensitive flower for it myself. I never really liked Spitting Image, for example.
The most damaging was David steel in David Owens pocket.
I'll ask you again. Is the term you used - 'petty white scum' - racist or not? I think it obviously is, and so you don't have a leg to stand on in criticizing what anyone else might say, because you only care about racist language as a political tool, not out of principle. If you cared about it in principle, you'd obviously never use it yourself.
Of course it isn't racist as several of us have set out to you. Are crayons required so that we can draw you a picture? You are defending petty white racists calling black people dogs. Are all white people petty? No. Do you have to be white to be petty? No. So we can discard the racism accusation. But what they were saying had no qualifiers, it was "blacks". And you are repeatedly defending them.
Amazing. What you said is 100% racist and your denials are laughable. You could easily have condemned the racist language you heard - which would be totally reasonable and which I would agree with - without using racist language about the perpetrators. Whose language, contrary to your repeated lies, I haven't defended once. Feel free to quote an example where I have - you won't find one.
But you felt it wasn't enough to condemn racist language, you also had to use it yourself. Why was that?
Please tell me how "petty" and "scum" are racist terms
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
Agree that's one explanation for why the UK has problems now that France has substantially solved.
My point was that Scott's tweet is valid. The difference between the UK and other countries is too stark to be dismissed as playing games with statistics.
France still has double the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and double the number in ICU than the UK has.
The UK will now be at or below average deaths for the time of year
Not sure hospitalisation and ICU rates are that useful as point to point comparison. Not all Covid 19 sufferers end up in hospital and not all those that die from it go through ICU. What we can say is that the deaths came down much faster in France compared with the UK.
The trend isn't our friend as far as the UK's epidemic response is concerned.
If that graph was done by date of death the the peak would by higher and the drop would be steeper. Our lack of drop is deaths is a statistical phantom.
Also, the FT charts (as above) are logarithmic plots of the 7-day moving average. If you plot their data on a linear chart, it would be an obviously higher peak & steeper fall - about a factor of 7 from peak to today.
(Log charts are good for observing changes in rates of change between widely differing scales, but are not good for comparing absolute quantities by eye.)
Reason why I selected Log scale was that the absolute numbers now are all down at the X axis because all countries, UK included, are well off the peak. Log scale means that differences between countries now is visually downplayed. The UK comparative situation is actually worse than it might look.
Daily Average number of Covid-19 deaths in the last 7 days (8-14th June)
In alphabetical order Belgium 8 France 36 Germany 13 Italy 63 Spain 0 Sweden 31 UK 165
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
I think all anyone asks for is consistency here. How long has the person who attempted to set fire to the Cenotaph flag received, anyone know ? The police were literally there when it happened so it's not like a burglary where it might be difficult to find the suspect.
I seemed to remember in Gilmour case, he had spent the whole day rioting, causing mayhem, caught on camera smashing stuff up and setting fires. It was more that just that one act.
Eadric - you need to withdraw your comment that I "liked seeing these random people almost beaten to death". You can copy BluestBlue in taking offence at my use of the apparently racist words "petty" and "scum" if you like - he is just amusing. You sir are not.
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
Millions of Liverpool fans wish that match had never happened....
I'll ask you again. Is the term you used - 'petty white scum' - racist or not? I think it obviously is, and so you don't have a leg to stand on in criticizing what anyone else might say, because you only care about racist language as a political tool, not out of principle. If you cared about it in principle, you'd obviously never use it yourself.
Of course it isn't racist as several of us have set out to you. Are crayons required so that we can draw you a picture? You are defending petty white racists calling black people dogs. Are all white people petty? No. Do you have to be white to be petty? No. So we can discard the racism accusation. But what they were saying had no qualifiers, it was "blacks". And you are repeatedly defending them.
Amazing. What you said is 100% racist and your denials are laughable. You could easily have condemned the racist language you heard - which would be totally reasonable and which I would agree with - without using racist language about the perpetrators. Whose language, contrary to your repeated lies, I haven't defended once. Feel free to quote an example where I have - you won't find one.
But you felt it wasn't enough to condemn racist language, you also had to use it yourself. Why was that?
Please tell me how "petty" and "scum" are racist terms
When you attach them to a term denoting an inherent racial characteristic, in this case 'white'.
This is textbook stuff - I have no idea why you're still digging. I think we can all agree that what the people you overheard saying was wrong. You might even wish to call them 'scum' for doing so. But injecting racism into your complaint about racism is so self-defeating as to be absurd.
I seemed to remember in Gilmour case, he had spent the whole day causing mayham, smashing stuff up and setting fires. It was more that just that one act.
Hence the sentence, 16 months is longer than a fortnight. How long has the flag lighter received though.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
That's the other thing, how can you miss an opportunity like this to give a perfect "punishment fits the crime" community service order? Is there nothing in Great Britain that needs cleaning because it smells of piss?
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Which is the problem with the "outraging public decency" law. It lacks definition
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
What is really interesting is that although we may have locked down too late, it was actually a couple of weeks earlier than the scientific advisors were advising.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Basic question. Just where are people meant to take a piss (Even on a peaceful protest) ?! Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Yeah, it was clearly not intentional. The furore around the whole incident is ridiculous.
I seemed to remember in Gilmour case, he had spent the whole day rioting, causing mayhem, caught on camera smashing stuff up and setting fires. It was more that just that one act.
Part of his defence was that he was off his head on drugs, dealing with being rejected by his biological father. At 21, and still at Cambridge University, he was one of the youngest inmates.
I'm not sure that's a great line of defence to be honest!
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
If you don't like what a private company is doing you can boycott them.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
I'm not sure that that is relevant.
Was the *effect* any different. I don't recall significant differences in fall in transport usage, for example.
There was a comparative graph from Google data on Twitter somewhere, and I can't find it.
UK's lockdown was certainly not far softer than Germany's. A bit harder (and quite a bit longer) so far as I can tell. No doubt there are other European countries that also had softer lockdowns.
Much softer than France, I believe.
And Spain, and Italy.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Maybe Germany's lucky break was that around the height of the Italian Meltdown a town near Aachen had a very significant outbreak. This meant that most people took the clear advice of the government very seriously. The extent of the lockdown here was slightly less than in the UK. For example partners who lived in different households were allowed to "see" each other, where as some in the UK lost their jobs because of that.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Basic question. Just where are people meant to take a piss (Even on a peaceful protest) ?! Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
Well they were not supposed to be there so there was no need to provide toilets
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
What is really interesting is that although we may have locked down too late, it was actually a couple of weeks earlier than the scientific advisors were advising.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
Science isn't always exact. Odd that when criticism was being proffered of the government's actions they always hid behind the "we followed the science" defence and have now switched to "scientists advise we make decisions" justifications for going against the science / their previously announced rules.
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
What is really interesting is that although we may have locked down too late, it was actually a couple of weeks earlier than the scientific advisors were advising.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
It's due to the contradiction created by the fact that SAGE thought CV-19 would be overwhelmingly bad and therefore recommended fewer, rather than more, measures which they considered to be of only limited effect.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
I think all anyone asks for is consistency here. How long has the person who attempted to set fire to the Cenotaph flag received, anyone know ? The police were literally there when it happened so it's not like a burglary where it might be difficult to find the suspect.
I'd take a guess that most others involved in various types of altercations are yet to have their day in court. This guy turned up himself at a police station and pled guilty straight away. Many others are probably still being identified from CCTV and will take a while to get through the system.
What it will almost certainly do though, is for this man to end up as a martyr and rallying point for many of the unsavoury right-wing types, who see that after two weeks of violence the only guy apparently in prison is someone who was caught taking a piss.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Yeah, it was clearly not intentional. The furore around the whole incident is ridiculous.
Yeah it's not as if he went and found Mandela's monument and pissed on it and posted it to Facebook.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Basic question. Just where are people meant to take a piss (Even on a peaceful protest) ?! Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
Well they were not supposed to be there so there was no need to provide toilets
Toilet facilities are neither provided when the police have to kettle large crowds of protestors. You're right that they weren't supposed to be there but I don't think that practically speaking it would have made a difference.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Basic question. Just where are people meant to take a piss (Even on a peaceful protest) ?! Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
Well they were not supposed to be there so there was no need to provide toilets
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
What is really interesting is that although we may have locked down too late, it was actually a couple of weeks earlier than the scientific advisors were advising.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
No, I'm not sure either, Richard.
For the record, I went because the Government view at the time was that it would be ok and there was no obvious reason to dispute it. Also, I knew the weather forecast was good so I would be spending most of my time outdoors.
It's only in retrospect that I can see the decision was wrong but who knew what and when and why decisions were made is complex and unclear.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
My problem with it is that if he had intentionally pissed on the memorial, then I'd say a couple of months in prison would be fair. But I'm almost certain that he was doing nothing other than having a piss in the street, which is illegal, but I don't think warrants 14 days in prison.
Basic question. Just where are people meant to take a piss (Even on a peaceful protest) ?! Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
Well they were not supposed to be there so there was no need to provide toilets
Well yes, but this goes for both 'sides'.
Left-wing demonstrators can go days without relieving themselves. Everyone knows this.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
I think all anyone asks for is consistency here. How long has the person who attempted to set fire to the Cenotaph flag received, anyone know ? The police were literally there when it happened so it's not like a burglary where it might be difficult to find the suspect.
I'd take a guess that most others involved in various types of altercations are yet to have their day in court. This guy turned up himself at a police station and pled guilty straight away. Many others are probably still being identified from CCTV and will take a while to get through the system.
What it will almost certainly do though, is for this man to end up as a martyr and rallying point for many of the unsavoury right-wing types, who see that after two weeks of violence the only guy apparently in prison is someone who was caught taking a piss.
If the gent got two weeks for a Jimmy Riddle without malicious intent (to give him the benefit of the very real doubt) then I hate to think what the other sentences will be.
A Ramadan wave of infections and death from the Covid is now evident in many countries: Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Iraq.
Iran's decision to open the mosques like normal was incredible decision.
Quite a few decisions are looking a bit rough in retrospect. The Cheltenham Festival appears to have been a istake and as for Liverpool v A Madrid......
3,000 or so supporters came over from Madrid for a single day. Meanwhile, 200,000 people were returning from a holiday in Spain every day for about a fortnight.
60,000 were at Cheltenham Meanwhile 5,000,000 people were using the tube.
It was the late lockdown that was the problem, not specific events that were allowed before it was brought in.
In retrospect the UK had the chance to lock down a week earlier but did not. However most people were critical at the time that Cheltenham went ahead, except for those with tickets.
What is really interesting is that although we may have locked down too late, it was actually a couple of weeks earlier than the scientific advisors were advising.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
The lockdown in the UK was too lax in that it still let people wander the streets did nothing to mandate face coverings, especially on public transport. No control of the use of private cars etc I can’t understand why when they could see what was happening is Italy and Spain they didn’t immediately lockdown.
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
If you don't like what a private company is doing you can boycott them.
That wouldn't satisfy me if I thought YouTube were deleting politically-unpopular comments, because they might be doing it for fear of regulatory action; There's a nasty chilling effect where if a company *thinks* the government will pass laws that hurt them if they do something that displeases it, they go ahead and stop the displeasing thing, without the government ever needing to pass the law.
This is worse than actually passing the law because there's much less accountability; Parliament never debates the "censor the internet" law and you can't organize against it - because it doesn't actually exist - but despite its non-existence, the law is just as effective as if it had been passed.
Going to a rival platform probably won't help in this situation because if that platform becomes popular enough to get a network effect, it'll be subject to the exact same pressures.
OGH says, "What I find remarkable is how little the leader rating change is reflected in the voting figures."
I agree and wonder how far that reflects the deep damage Corbyn did to the Labour brand. In other words, are people saying they are impressed by Starmer but worry that his party will hobble or even ditch him if they get into office?
What it speaks to is Starmer's urgent need for a "Militant moment" - a very visible event that says, "This is MY party now". I've little doubt that Starmer's team are working on how to engineer that, whether through the antisemitism work, the postponed conference (if it ever happens) or otherwise. But I think there's a danger, if they can't make it happen in the next six months, it won't happen at all.
When is the EHRC report on antisemitism due to be published?
If that report says what most of us expect it to, that’s going to be Starmer’s one chance to expel the New Militant.
That he kept Rebecca Long-Bailey in his Cabinet was a worrying start.
I expect Starmer to accept the conclusions of the report. I also expect many of the twitter Corbynite diehards to dispute it.
What does RLB do? If she backs her current leader, that's a win for Starmer. If she joins the diehards and he sacks her, that's a win for Starmer.
Anything else and he loses.
Rebecca Long-Bailey is very quickly making herself entirely irrelevant. Her shadowing of abysmal Gavin Williamson has been pitiful. I suspect she will be reshuffled as soon as it is decent to do it.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
I'm not sure that that is relevant.
Was the *effect* any different. I don't recall significant differences in fall in transport usage, for example.
There was a comparative graph from Google data on Twitter somewhere, and I can't find it.
UK's lockdown was certainly not far softer than Germany's. A bit harder (and quite a bit longer) so far as I can tell. No doubt there are other European countries that also had softer lockdowns.
Much softer than France, I believe.
And Spain, and Italy.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Maybe Germany's lucky break was that around the height of the Italian Meltdown a town near Aachen had a very significant outbreak. This meant that most people took the clear advice of the government very seriously. The extent of the lockdown here was slightly less than in the UK. For example partners who lived in different households were allowed to "see" each other, where as some in the UK lost their jobs because of that.
There was an element of luck about the German decision but like good punters everywhere, they made the most of it.
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
If you don't like what a private company is doing you can boycott them.
That wouldn't satisfy me if I thought YouTube were deleting politically-unpopular comments, because they might be doing it for fear of regulatory action; There's a nasty chilling effect where if a company *thinks* the government will pass laws that hurt them if they do something that displeases it, they go ahead and stop the displeasing thing, without the government ever needing to pass the law.
This is worse than actually passing the law because there's much less accountability; Parliament never debates the "censor the internet" law and you can't organize against it - because it doesn't actually exist - but despite its non-existence, the law is just as effective as if it had been passed.
Going to a rival platform probably won't help in this situation because if that platform becomes popular enough to get a network effect, it'll be subject to the exact same pressures.
Youtube got caught a couple of weeks ago, auto-deleting certain phrases the Chinese didn't like, relating to Tibet and Tiananmen.
Boris undoubtedly took a hit for keeping Cummings. He presumably concluded it was worth it. Too early to say if that was the right call or not.
Whether in the longer term it will be seen to be politically disastrous remains to be seen. Whichever way you look at it, Johnson's Covid agenda was hijacked by the Cummings escapade. That may be a bigger legacy issue for Johnson than if he survives as PM for the life of the Parliament.
Firstly, I do not think that Cummings did hijack the Covid agenda. The driving force for coming out of lockdown is economics, not Cummings. Secondly, whether the economy recovers quickly will decide Boris's fate and his legacy. The lack of perspective on the significance or otherwise of a special advisor which dominated our press and media for 10 days is still to fully dissipate, it appears.
I can understand the need to unlock the economy to mitigate economic damage. It just appears to all but the most enthusiastic Conservatives that this process was accelerated, and without due thought, to mitigate against the negative press the Cummings story was generating. It may be wholly coincidental, but it doesn't look like it.
I genuinely find the perception that Cummings' idiocy, as opposed to a borrowing requirement of £60bn in a single month was the driving force behind this profoundly delusional. It seriously makes me worry that far too many people in this country have no clue at all how serious our position is and what the implications for our future are.
Most people will only see the issue when the magic money tree cheque disappears.
Around 2m are going to see it within weeks as their jobs disappear. And proportionally more will be in Scotland since we are dragging our feet. No doubt that will be Westminster's fault too though.
They are the one's making the decisions on their own David, no consultations, just their way or the highway. Just exposes how shackled we are and have to beg them for everything , pathetic.
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
Draining the swamp.
You know the owners of these gigantic media companies are billionaires, and perhaps due to become trillionaires in the not-too-distant future?
What happens if a popular movement for the redistribution of wealth rises up and gets itself completely censored by said media billionaires? Because you can sure they'll justify it as 'draining the swamp' too...
Pisspoor. Just so so poor. And what a weak weak man. It's a bit pathetic, frankly, and one hates to say this about our PM. I do anyway, I much prefer to respect the person in that position, regardless of party.
Anyway bottom line. I was 'unfavourable trending better' and now I'm HIGHLY UNFAVOURABLE and trending the other way. Christ knows how low he can go. I'd rather not speculate.
Did you catch Dead Ringers this weekend? A review of life under the virus. There was a sketch at the end about Boris, Dom and Durham, which was uncomfortable listening (and I'm not a fan of B + D). Let's just say that having a chief adviser called Dom was made pretty near the knuckle.
Now, you might say that nobody's vote has ever been changed by any satirical production. I think the creators of Private Eye pointed out the huge success of 1930's Berlin cabaret. But sometimes unfair comedic images do stick; Maggie in a man's suit, grey John Major, Blair teasing Prescott for still being a lefty. And if BoJo's satirical image goes from Dulux dog made human to Dom's victim in a No 10 dungeon, that won't help him.
No I didn't see it but I know what you mean. That type of thing can drip drip drip and have an impact, fair or not.
I'm a bit too much of a sensitive flower for it myself. I never really liked Spitting Image, for example.
The most damaging was David steel in David Owens pocket.
Yes. That was crass. It was driven by a stereotypical view of 'tall dark and handsome' men being alphas. Which is of course bollox. And I should know.
Boris undoubtedly took a hit for keeping Cummings. He presumably concluded it was worth it. Too early to say if that was the right call or not.
Whether in the longer term it will be seen to be politically disastrous remains to be seen. Whichever way you look at it, Johnson's Covid agenda was hijacked by the Cummings escapade. That may be a bigger legacy issue for Johnson than if he survives as PM for the life of the Parliament.
Firstly, I do not think that Cummings did hijack the Covid agenda. The driving force for coming out of lockdown is economics, not Cummings. Secondly, whether the economy recovers quickly will decide Boris's fate and his legacy. The lack of perspective on the significance or otherwise of a special advisor which dominated our press and media for 10 days is still to fully dissipate, it appears.
I can understand the need to unlock the economy to mitigate economic damage. It just appears to all but the most enthusiastic Conservatives that this process was accelerated, and without due thought, to mitigate against the negative press the Cummings story was generating. It may be wholly coincidental, but it doesn't look like it.
I genuinely find the perception that Cummings' idiocy, as opposed to a borrowing requirement of £60bn in a single month was the driving force behind this profoundly delusional. It seriously makes me worry that far too many people in this country have no clue at all how serious our position is and what the implications for our future are.
Most people will only see the issue when the magic money tree cheque disappears.
Around 2m are going to see it within weeks as their jobs disappear. And proportionally more will be in Scotland since we are dragging our feet. No doubt that will be Westminster's fault too though.
They are the one's making the decisions on their own David, no consultations, just their way or the highway. Just exposes how shackled we are and have to beg them for everything , pathetic.
Except policy in this area is a competence of the Scottish government.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
I'm not sure that that is relevant.
Was the *effect* any different. I don't recall significant differences in fall in transport usage, for example.
There was a comparative graph from Google data on Twitter somewhere, and I can't find it.
UK's lockdown was certainly not far softer than Germany's. A bit harder (and quite a bit longer) so far as I can tell. No doubt there are other European countries that also had softer lockdowns.
Much softer than France, I believe.
And Spain, and Italy.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Maybe Germany's lucky break was that around the height of the Italian Meltdown a town near Aachen had a very significant outbreak. This meant that most people took the clear advice of the government very seriously. The extent of the lockdown here was slightly less than in the UK. For example partners who lived in different households were allowed to "see" each other, where as some in the UK lost their jobs because of that.
Where I am in NRW (the most populous state), the ban on meeting more than one person from a different household only ever applied to public spaces. You were specifically allowed to invite as many people to your own home as you liked (although the advice was to avoid inviting lots). Other states had different rules.
I think part of the luck was that because there was, relatively, a lot of testing early on people knew about the outbreaks, and the outbreaks were kept a bit under control. But it did seem to me that most people were not taking it that seriously until the second week of March when Merkel finally broke her silence - then people suddenly started taking it seriously.
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
Boris undoubtedly took a hit for keeping Cummings. He presumably concluded it was worth it. Too early to say if that was the right call or not.
The Tories have to keep their electoral coalition together. That will depend on ensuring continuing division along Brexit lines. No-one does disunity better than Dominic Cummings. The flaw in the plan may be that the opposition is no longer led by Jeremy Corbyn. As David Lammy observed this morning, the only people talking about statues being removed right now are the Tories. Can you fight a perpetual culture war against a non-existent foe?
If that's what Lammy was saying he was being dishonest. The BLM/twitter mobs lifted the attack on statues and symbols of past oppression from a background noise to front page news. I am cynical enough to acknowledge that the government response has been, "bring it on" for electoral reasons. Having a Corbynite foe of course makes life easy. SKS has been right not to play but Lammy is being disingenuous at best.
What he said - completely accurately - is that Labour is not talking about it, neither are the LibDems, the Greens or the SNP. The only party talking about it are the Tories. It's classic Cummings. His entire modus operando is about the creation of division. Given the mess the government is making of just about everything it goes near you can see why he is doing it. I just wonder whether it is sustainable for four years.
The 'gathering' of Loyalists in Glasgow yesterday and Saturday pretty much encapsulates this. Yesterday having once more found that nobody was actually attacking their precious monuments, the beered-up twats started in on the police, passers by and another faction of football supporters looking for a ruck. These guys are just gagging for an enemy within.
The other interesting point about Scotland and statues is how little reaction there has been to the vandalism of Bruce at Bannockburn - if we Scots were as obsessed with the past as the Tories and their fellow travellers down south [edit]* are (remember how they kept going on and on about Bannockburn in 2014) we'd be rioting too. But it's in fact: meh, some poor sod of a NTS stone conservator has to go out with the cleaning kit, glad it's not me ....
*Edit: some of the strongest reactions I saw on Twitter to the Bruce news (and not in support of the vandalism) were actually from staunch unionists.
Nats are too busy fighting about trans rights with each other now to bother with Bruce
You're not good at basic logic, are you? The Nazis were indeed racists, but 'Nazi' is not in itself a racist term, but a technical description of political party.
The terms used by RochdalePioneers, however - 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' - are intrinsically racist in themselves, and thus are not suitable political epithets.
This really isn't hard to understand. But now you've dug yourself into a deep hole of hypocrisy and don't want to admit it, so no doubt you'll keep digging...
Racism = power + prejudice. White people have the power so no pejorative directed at them is racist.
Racism is discriminating against somebody based on their race.
Boris undoubtedly took a hit for keeping Cummings. He presumably concluded it was worth it. Too early to say if that was the right call or not.
The Tories have to keep their electoral coalition together. That will depend on ensuring continuing division along Brexit lines. No-one does disunity better than Dominic Cummings. The flaw in the plan may be that the opposition is no longer led by Jeremy Corbyn. As David Lammy observed this morning, the only people talking about statues being removed right now are the Tories. Can you fight a perpetual culture war against a non-existent foe?
If that's what Lammy was saying he was being dishonest. The BLM/twitter mobs lifted the attack on statues and symbols of past oppression from a background noise to front page news. I am cynical enough to acknowledge that the government response has been, "bring it on" for electoral reasons. Having a Corbynite foe of course makes life easy. SKS has been right not to play but Lammy is being disingenuous at best.
What he said - completely accurately - is that Labour is not talking about it, neither are the LibDems, the Greens or the SNP. The only party talking about it are the Tories. It's classic Cummings. His entire modus operando is about the creation of division. Given the mess the government is making of just about everything it goes near you can see why he is doing it. I just wonder whether it is sustainable for four years.
The 'gathering' of Loyalists in Glasgow yesterday and Saturday pretty much encapsulates this. Yesterday having once more found that nobody was actually attacking their precious monuments, the beered-up twats started in on the police, passers by and another faction of football supporters looking for a ruck. These guys are just gagging for an enemy within.
The other interesting point about Scotland and statues is how little reaction there has been to the vandalism of Bruce at Bannockburn - if we Scots were as obsessed with the past as the Tories and their fellow travellers down south [edit]* are (remember how they kept going on and on about Bannockburn in 2014) we'd be rioting too. But it's in fact: meh, some poor sod of a NTS stone conservator has to go out with the cleaning kit, glad it's not me ....
*Edit: some of the strongest reactions I saw on Twitter to the Bruce news (and not in support of the vandalism) were actually from staunch unionists.
Forgive me a wry smile.
Do the SNP not close their every annual conference re-brainwashing themselves as to how much they hate the English because of something that happened in 1314 or thereabouts?
"Scots, who have with Wallace bled, Scots, whom Bruce has often led, Welcome to your gory bed Or to victory."
The only political establishment more obsessed with historical victimhood I can think of are probably the Serbs.
There's a difference between securing national freedom and hating the English. A great many of the delegates there WERE English. Thet wouldn't be there if they didn't know the difference.
Never stand in the way of a PB Scotch expert explaining Scotland and the SNP to us. It's most enlightening..
You'll note I didn't say "Scottish".
I think the SNP handling of itself over a number of decades is quitet clear enough.
Tories really hate that the SNP are as successful whilst they are a bunch of duds.
Pissy man has been given 14 days in jail...one day for every pint he had drunk.
That sounds awfully draconian, when a couple of days' community service cleaning the streets could have sufficed. Risks inflaming tensions, as noted by Konstantin Kisin, among others.
I think all anyone asks for is consistency here. How long has the person who attempted to set fire to the Cenotaph flag received, anyone know ? The police were literally there when it happened so it's not like a burglary where it might be difficult to find the suspect.
I'd take a guess that most others involved in various types of altercations are yet to have their day in court. This guy turned up himself at a police station and pled guilty straight away. Many others are probably still being identified from CCTV and will take a while to get through the system.
What it will almost certainly do though, is for this man to end up as a martyr and rallying point for many of the unsavoury right-wing types, who see that after two weeks of violence the only guy apparently in prison is someone who was caught taking a piss.
If the gent got two weeks for a Jimmy Riddle without malicious intent (to give him the benefit of the very real doubt) then I hate to think what the other sentences will be.
As we saw back in 2011, magistrates and judges tend to take a very dim view indeed of organised public disorder.
The issues this year don't appear to have been on that scale (yet), but a few exemplary sentences at the start might do a good job of keeping a lid on things over the summer.
Comparing final pre-election Johnson leader ratings to current Johnson leader ratings.
YouGov: Final pre-election: Approve 41%, Disapprove 52% (Net -11%) Most recent: Well 43%, Badly 50% (Net -7%)
2% Net swing from Badly to Approve
Opinium: Final pre-election: Well 33%, Badly 47% (Net -14%) Most recent: Approve 37%, Disapprove 43% (Net -6%)
4% Net swing from Disapprove to Well
IPSOS MORI: Final pre-election: Approve 36%, Disapprove 56% (Net -20%) Most recent: Satisfied 48%, Dissatisfied 49% (Net -1%)
9.5% Net swing from Dissatisfied to Approve
No Survation pre-election it seems to compare with. No recent Deltapoll to compare with.
So across all the pollsters there has been a net swing from pre-election in Boris's favour. Post-Cummings, post-COVID, post-Brexit as it stands the Johnson approval is higher as it stands than it was pre-election.
That is quite incredible.
Since the GE there has been a pandemic killing tens of thousands, the government has locked everyone up, closed the schools and shut the pubs, there are race riots in the streets, and Labour have a shiny new leader, yet the stats are there for all to see - Boris is better thought of today than he was when he won an 80 seat majority.
I wouldn't have believed it if you hadn't shown it to be so. Great analysis Philip, there's not a lot of it about.
Thank you Sam.
A more considered response than "A Boris fanboy in denial". I think its a shame OGH @MikeSmithson didn't reply in more detail to the analysis with the numbers involved.
"Boris fanboy in denial". That is harsh indeed. It's probably fair, but it's very very harsh.
A horrifying example of why we need the BLM movement this morning. In the queue for Wilko's. Rancid gammon in the queue talking to his rancid gammon mate on a nearby bench.
Black people should be used as whipping boys. Worse than dogs. Should be kicked instead of the dog. And then "see you later" as he went into the shop.
This is the kind of petty white scum bigotry that Johnson and his team have in mind when banging on about protecting our statues...
Do you think that using terms like 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' enhances or detracts from your genuine commitment to the cause of anti-racism?
It works for me.
You think using racist terms for whites is compatible with anti-racism?
Well, at least that tells us all we need to know about the sincerity of your principles.
That is like saying one can't call a Nazi a Nazi, because the term Nazi is an offensive label that could cause offence. Ah, bless!
You're not good at basic logic, are you? The Nazis were indeed racists, but 'Nazi' is not in itself a racist term, but a technical description of political party.
The terms used by RochdalePioneers, however - 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' - are intrinsically racist in themselves, and thus are not suitable political epithets.
This really isn't hard to understand. But now you've dug yourself into a deep hole of hypocrisy and don't want to admit it, so no doubt you'll keep digging...
I am white and middle aged, but I find "gammon" very amusing. It is not racist because while it is probably necessary to be white to be a gammon, you are not automatically a gammon if you are white. You do have to be angry and prejudiced, so if the hat fits Mr Blue, lol. I think it would be a good description also for many Scottish Nationalists, as well as their similarly angry English nationalist lookalikes. You don't get much more gammon like than Malcolmg.
Yet again we have the site arsehole of arseholes pontificating. Get back in the gutter where you belong Dickhead.
Judges, the EU and EU citizens, transgender people, the BBC, environmentalists, etc. There is a long line of "enemies" waiting to be teed up, all designed to create wedge points to keep the current Tory voting coalition together. I just wonder whether it will work - especially if we are slow to recover from what is coming later this year.
Yep. All inevitable since 24/6/16. At some point though the posh boys will lose control of it. And then it will get really ugly. And then the posh boys will make an accommodation with the new forces, and bingo...
Like Doctor Who I’m just wondering who the Cornish time lord will come back as next time..
Will he be a woman?
I remember the trouble they got into when Matt Smith said ‘still not ginger’ on his first appearance.
Most of the complainants didn’t understand the context (David Tennant’s first lines were, ‘Ohhhh, I wanted to be ginger’) or thought the writers were being homophobic. One or the other.
A horrifying example of why we need the BLM movement this morning. In the queue for Wilko's. Rancid gammon in the queue talking to his rancid gammon mate on a nearby bench.
Black people should be used as whipping boys. Worse than dogs. Should be kicked instead of the dog. And then "see you later" as he went into the shop.
This is the kind of petty white scum bigotry that Johnson and his team have in mind when banging on about protecting our statues...
Do you think that using terms like 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' enhances or detracts from your genuine commitment to the cause of anti-racism?
It works for me.
You think using racist terms for whites is compatible with anti-racism?
Well, at least that tells us all we need to know about the sincerity of your principles.
That is like saying one can't call a Nazi a Nazi, because the term Nazi is an offensive label that could cause offence. Ah, bless!
You're not good at basic logic, are you? The Nazis were indeed racists, but 'Nazi' is not in itself a racist term, but a technical description of political party.
The terms used by RochdalePioneers, however - 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' - are intrinsically racist in themselves, and thus are not suitable political epithets.
This really isn't hard to understand. But now you've dug yourself into a deep hole of hypocrisy and don't want to admit it, so no doubt you'll keep digging...
I am white and middle aged, but I find "gammon" very amusing. It is not racist because while it is probably necessary to be white to be a gammon, you are not automatically a gammon if you are white. You do have to be angry and prejudiced, so if the hat fits Mr Blue, lol. I think it would be a good description also for many Scottish Nationalists, as well as their similarly angry English nationalist lookalikes. You don't get much more gammon like than Malcolmg.
A friend of mine - white, middle-aged and no Lefty - happily refers to some of the more stick-in-the-mud characters at his workplace as 'Gammons'.
Whatever the merits of the urinator's sentence the government simply has to grasp that everybody must be dealt with equally.
Selective justice, however well intentioned, is lethal to law and order.
You may as well set up recruiting stations for a significant party of the far right.
Well, you do wonder a bit what will happen to those who destroyed a grade 2 listed statue if taking a slash next to a memorial, however sensitive, is 14 days.
Six months?
I was expecting them to get a heavy fine and being bound over, and only prison if/when they refused to pay the fine. But it looks as though I may have been underrating the judicial system.
You're not good at basic logic, are you? The Nazis were indeed racists, but 'Nazi' is not in itself a racist term, but a technical description of political party.
The terms used by RochdalePioneers, however - 'rancid gammon' and 'petty white scum' - are intrinsically racist in themselves, and thus are not suitable political epithets.
This really isn't hard to understand. But now you've dug yourself into a deep hole of hypocrisy and don't want to admit it, so no doubt you'll keep digging...
Racism = power + prejudice. White people have the power so no pejorative directed at them is racist.
Racism is discriminating against somebody based on their race.
End of.
That's a good definition but I wouldn't say it's "end of".
For example, discriminating against a disadvantaged group vs discriminating against an advantaged group.
For me, and I think for most people, there can be a meaningful difference there.
Whatever the merits of the urinator's sentence the government simply has to grasp that everybody must be dealt with equally.
Selective justice, however well intentioned, is lethal to law and order.
You may as well set up recruiting stations for a significant party of the far right.
It is a ridiculous sentence that will be overturned on appeal unless he has a truly spectacular record of doing much the same. But there is room for exemplary sentences as we saw at the time of the riots.
Why, I wonder haven't we a name for, or any statements from (or about) the white alleged racist demonstrator who was carried out of harms way by the black guy in the now famous clip?
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
I'm not sure that that is relevant.
Was the *effect* any different. I don't recall significant differences in fall in transport usage, for example.
There was a comparative graph from Google data on Twitter somewhere, and I can't find it.
UK's lockdown was certainly not far softer than Germany's. A bit harder (and quite a bit longer) so far as I can tell. No doubt there are other European countries that also had softer lockdowns.
Much softer than France, I believe.
And Spain, and Italy.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Maybe Germany's lucky break was that around the height of the Italian Meltdown a town near Aachen had a very significant outbreak. This meant that most people took the clear advice of the government very seriously. The extent of the lockdown here was slightly less than in the UK. For example partners who lived in different households were allowed to "see" each other, where as some in the UK lost their jobs because of that.
Where I am in NRW (the most populous state), the ban on meeting more than one person from a different household only ever applied to public spaces. You were specifically allowed to invite as many people to your own home as you liked (although the advice was to avoid inviting lots). Other states had different rules.
I think part of the luck was that because there was, relatively, a lot of testing early on people knew about the outbreaks, and the outbreaks were kept a bit under control. But it did seem to me that most people were not taking it that seriously until the second week of March when Merkel finally broke her silence - then people suddenly started taking it seriously.
When the the Gruppenfuhrerin shouts 'Achtung!' everyone sits up straight.
Just reporting *the last 7 days* is a bit tricksy since some of those countries are further along the curve than the UK.
It's not really necessary to play games like this to make the UK look incompetent, it looks incompetent already.
Yes and also a couple of countries have issues with accuracy of reporting. Nevertheless infections are running many times higher in the UK than anywhere else in Europe, except Sweden. The difference is too big to explain, except that the UK has problems that other countries don't have.
The UK lockdown was far softer than other nations.
In France leaving the home without the official paperwork authorising you to do so and explaining when, where and why you are going was subject to a hefty fine. In the UK you could go out and about whenever you wanted and just needed to say you had a good reason if asked why.
Agree that's one explanation for why the UK has problems now that France has substantially solved.
My point was that Scott's tweet is valid. The difference between the UK and other countries is too stark to be dismissed as playing games with statistics.
France still has double the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 and double the number in ICU than the UK has.
The UK will now be at or below average deaths for the time of year
Not sure hospitalisation and ICU rates are that useful as point to point comparison. Not all Covid 19 sufferers end up in hospital and not all those that die from it go through ICU. What we can say is that the deaths came down much faster in France compared with the UK.
The trend isn't our friend as far as the UK's epidemic response is concerned.
If that graph was done by date of death the the peak would by higher and the drop would be steeper. Our lack of drop is deaths is a statistical phantom.
Also, the FT charts (as above) are logarithmic plots of the 7-day moving average. If you plot their data on a linear chart, it would be an obviously higher peak & steeper fall - about a factor of 7 from peak to today.
(Log charts are good for observing changes in rates of change between widely differing scales, but are not good for comparing absolute quantities by eye.)
Reason why I selected Log scale was that the absolute numbers now are all down at the X axis because all countries, UK included, are well off the peak. Log scale means that differences between countries now is visually downplayed. The UK comparative situation is actually worse than it might look.
Daily Average number of Covid-19 deaths in the last 7 days (8-14th June)
In alphabetical order Belgium 8 France 36 Germany 13 Italy 63 Spain 0 Sweden 31 UK 165
OK guys, do we all remember the Google Churchill kerfuffle? We should do, it was yesterday.
Here's another one, which is even weirder
Go to Youtube, and select a random video. Doesn't matter which one. Add this comment underneath:
"Black Lives Matter violence"
Within 30 seconds or so, it will be automatically deleted. I'm not joking. I did it last night, and I did it this morning: same result both times.
Now I can understand why Youtube might censor certain racist terms. But if you want to comment that this is "Black Lives Matter violence", which is not racist, just an opinion, you cannot.
Same goes for things like "this is black violence", or "what about black violence". They just disappear.
YouTube is preventing commenters from simply expressing lawful opinions
Comments
https://twitter.com/ruthiesun/status/1272445838099275777?s=20
https://twitter.com/benatipsosmori/status/1272488202260156419?s=20
I'm a bit too much of a sensitive flower for it myself. I never really liked Spitting Image, for example.
Take your point though. Nobody is disputing the 'late lockdown' issue. The two sporting events were still wrong though. And there is of course a big difference between people returning of necessity from holiday and fans voluntarily attending a crowded football stadium.
Later peeps!
Secondly, it sounds from the story as if he handed himself in because his father recognised him and told him to 'fess up or he'd shop the lad himself (and I applaud the father for that).
@SouthamObserver and @Scrapheap_as_was - I see the pissy man was one of your own.
But you felt it wasn't enough to condemn racist language, you also had to use it yourself. Why was that?
I'd even started to call him Boris.
Back to Johnson now - if he's lucky.
Knowing what we know now (and usual disclaimer, I'm a physicist who teaches GCSE science, so I know a bit of biology but not much...) it looks like:
1 You don't need particularly harsh measures to keep Covid-19 numbers constant. Stop the most extreme spreading events, wear masks, wash hands and have working testing and tracing. Germany got lucky, did enough early on that their numbers never got very big. Sweden is sort of doing the same, but with a higher baseline.
2 If you miss that early opportunity, your choices are more limited. Lockdowns work to reduce the rate of infection (it would be pretty weird if they didn't). The harder the lockdown, the faster the fall; compare China, Spain, UK, Sweden.
3 So if you are a government and you miss the bus on step 1, you have two Solomonesque judgments to make. First is do you go for a harsher, shorter lockdown or a softer, longer one? Most of Europe went for the first, the UK seems to have gone for the second- perhaps not realising that softer = longer. Second, when do you try to transition back to "we can control this with softer measures?" The temptation will be for the UK to relax controls when there is more virus about than in other countries. There are economic and social arguments for that, but it's a gamble.
Please cool it or else the bans will start
https://twitter.com/benatipsosmori/status/1272491297039888385?s=20
The police were literally there when it happened so it's not like a burglary where it might be difficult to find the suspect.
This is textbook stuff - I have no idea why you're still digging. I think we can all agree that what the people you overheard saying was wrong. You might even wish to call them 'scum' for doing so. But injecting racism into your complaint about racism is so self-defeating as to be absurd.
I am really not sure where that leaves us in terms of criticism on this specific issue.
https://twitter.com/andrew_lilico/status/1272489370994585600
Normally it'd be the pubs but those are closed by fiat.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/06/david-gilmour-ive-been-bonded-to-charlie-since-he-was-three-we-were-incensed-by-the-injustice
Part of his defence was that he was off his head on drugs, dealing with being rejected by his biological father. At 21, and still at Cambridge University, he was one of the youngest inmates.
I'm not sure that's a great line of defence to be honest!
What it will almost certainly do though, is for this man to end up as a martyr and rallying point for many of the unsavoury right-wing types, who see that after two weeks of violence the only guy apparently in prison is someone who was caught taking a piss.
For the record, I went because the Government view at the time was that it would be ok and there was no obvious reason to dispute it. Also, I knew the weather forecast was good so I would be spending most of my time outdoors.
It's only in retrospect that I can see the decision was wrong but who knew what and when and why decisions were made is complex and unclear.
This is worse than actually passing the law because there's much less accountability; Parliament never debates the "censor the internet" law and you can't organize against it - because it doesn't actually exist - but despite its non-existence, the law is just as effective as if it had been passed.
Going to a rival platform probably won't help in this situation because if that platform becomes popular enough to get a network effect, it'll be subject to the exact same pressures.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/05/26/1738201/youtube-is-deleting-comments-with-two-phrases-that-insult-chinas-communist-party
It's very worrying behaviour, and fuels the narrative that social media companies are taking sides in the culture war.
What happens if a popular movement for the redistribution of wealth rises up and gets itself completely censored by said media billionaires? Because you can sure they'll justify it as 'draining the swamp' too...
They might have all sold out, or they might have been pulled.
This doesn’t appear to be the case for Bo Selecta or League of Gentlemen though.
That outrage drives out reason on the web in general is an observation of long-standing. It's one of the things that is normal about this place.
I think part of the luck was that because there was, relatively, a lot of testing early on people knew about the outbreaks, and the outbreaks were kept a bit under control. But it did seem to me that most people were not taking it that seriously until the second week of March when Merkel finally broke her silence - then people suddenly started taking it seriously.
YouTube's recommendation algorithm *is* the swamp.
End of.
Not very good at maths, is he? The site’s been up for 15 years not three decades.
Will he be a woman?
The issues this year don't appear to have been on that scale (yet), but a few exemplary sentences at the start might do a good job of keeping a lid on things over the summer.
Before you go can we get your views on the current situation we're in ?
Most of the complainants didn’t understand the context (David Tennant’s first lines were, ‘Ohhhh, I wanted to be ginger’) or thought the writers were being homophobic. One or the other.
Selective justice, however well intentioned, is lethal to law and order.
You may as well set up recruiting stations for a significant party of the far right.
https://www.politico.eu/article/criminal-suspects-data-sharing-uk-eu-brexit/
How many people pissing in the streets get 14 days in prison?
Six months?
I was expecting them to get a heavy fine and being bound over, and only prison if/when they refused to pay the fine. But it looks as though I may have been underrating the judicial system.
For example, discriminating against a disadvantaged group vs discriminating against an advantaged group.
For me, and I think for most people, there can be a meaningful difference there.
Pause.
Ah, my coat...