Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regualar political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
Yes. Libertarians and contrarians like Toby Young have been supported by me for years, especially against attempts to take him down by the woke left - but not on this subject, he’s being an idiot, Julia H-B the same.
War and pandemic are not normal times, and thankfully this awful year is likely to finish with a bunch of good news on vaccines.
Same here.
There is literally no libertarian reason to be anti-vax.
Being anti-compulsory vax while still encouraging people to do it and recognising the science and safety is entirely reasonable. But spreading anti-vax conspiracy lies? Nothing liberal in that.
Ant-vax seems to be associated with American "Libertarians" who often seem to be Republicans without the branding.
As with the American version of many things, the libertarians in the rest of the world generally go WTF?
If all British meat has to be slaughtered in the UK, I wonder if we will see a copying of New Zealand lamb approach and it all / large proportion becoming halal, because then there is a premium for export to certain markets?
@NickPalmer did some very good work on this, the definition of ‘halal’ (and ‘kosher’) is slowly and quietly changing under the radar.
Yes, the Middle East is full of NZ lamb, it’s definitely an export opportunity.
Is it an export opportunity that is currently denied to us?
No, trade is never denied even if on WTO terms. Hence why we can trade with the EU with No Deal too.
Though signing free trade deals with those nations is currently denied to us, yes.
Perhaps I should be more direct. Why, after Brexit, will we be in a better position to export halal lamb to the Middle east than we currently are?
Because we can do a trade deal with the GCC (with whom we have a huge trade surplus), and because we no longer have to follow EU regulations on things like live export of animals, which incentivises stock to be sold within the EU at the expense of animal welfare.
So not so much an opportunity as a plan B for what to do with all the lamb that we will no longer be able to export to the EU. Cheers.
Or, to put it another way, an opportunity to lead the world in animal welfare standards, by exporting meat rather than transporting livestock in inhumane conditions thousands of miles to slaughterhouses, just to make a few bucks more.
Or possibly an opportunity to produce cheaper halal meat once the inconvenient rules set out in Regulation (EC) 1099/2009 on the protection of animals at the time of killing are no longer applicable to the UK.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
Even accepting Toby's points (I know, but bear with me) he should surely still be in favour of the vaccine being made available: 1. the vaccines have been shown to be very effective at reducing those false positives. Given the pandemic is entirely/mostly a pandemic of somehow infectious false positives, that still ends the pandemic and all restrictions will therefore be able to end. WIN 2. there's hardly any disease circulating anyway, so hardly anyone affected. NEUTRAL/MINOR LOSS 3. only stupid people will take the vaccine, infertility will therefore give Toby his desired IQ-basd eugenics programme. WIN 4. see above, kills people stupid enough to take the vaccine, reduces stupidity more quickly. WIN 5. see above, smart people obviously won't take the vaccine for years, so only stupid people affected. WIN (unless vaccine extends life for the stupid people, but we know that's not true, see points 1-4)
Overall: BIGLY WIN from vaccination programme
Ah, but you're assuming Toby wants what's best.
First: For him to "win", they need to abandon lockdowns and then see that no problems happen, either because there's no disease around or it's practically harmless. This way, everyone will credit the vaccine, so he can't prove he "wins."
Second: A decent chunk of his subscriber base are antivaxxer. He therefore has to give them antivaxxer fodder to support his subscriber base.
Guernsey has already identified all vaccinating centres and who goes where. Huge fuss from sports chucked out of a large sports hall commandeered for the purpose.
So has England. I wonder who will get to go to Epsom racecourse?
So while Starmer is allowed to criticize the government from every angle, for every decision and the media aren't interested on picking him up on the fact he pushed for a flawed circuit breaker approach, Boris getting a punch in isn't acceptable...
Do you really need this explained? Boris is for Brexit. He is bad. SKS was a remainer. He is good. Objectivity is in desuetude. That's the way it is.
So a politician criticising a politician is good or bad?
Politicians normally get as much criticism as they deserve, possibly a little less, but the maniacal hatred of this government which has resulted in hysterical hyperbole about every twist and turn of the virus and the second guessing and attempted undermining of every decision is driven by the B word. We can only hope we can get past this in the next few months.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regualar political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
Yes. Libertarians and contrarians like Toby Young have been supported by me for years, especially against attempts to take him down by the woke left - but not on this subject, he’s being an idiot, Julia H-B the same.
War and pandemic are not normal times, and thankfully this awful year is likely to finish with a bunch of good news on vaccines.
Same here.
There is literally no libertarian reason to be anti-vax.
Being anti-compulsory vax while still encouraging people to do it and recognising the science and safety is entirely reasonable. But spreading anti-vax conspiracy lies? Nothing liberal in that.
Ant-vax seems to be associated with American "Libertarians" who often seem to be Republicans without the branding.
As with the American version of many things, the libertarians in the rest of the world generally go WTF?
That's well said. Can't stand what the American "right" has become.
So while Starmer is allowed to criticize the government from every angle, for every decision and the media aren't interested on picking him up on the fact he pushed for a flawed circuit breaker approach, Boris getting a punch in isn't acceptable...
Do you really need this explained? Boris is for Brexit. He is bad. SKS was a remainer. He is good. Objectivity is in desuetude. That's the way it is.
Nearly right, David.
But in that small sample analysis you have made one error. Boris is not for Brexit. He is for Boris. Brexit was a convenient vehicle to get him to Boris.
And of course again these laws being passed have absolutely nothing to do with needing to fool people such as our very own @Philip_Thompson that we are forging our own way in the world.
Boris is a selfish bastard. As are most politicians. I don't think that is what is driving our media's responses.
So while Starmer is allowed to criticize the government from every angle, for every decision and the media aren't interested on picking him up on the fact he pushed for a flawed circuit breaker approach, Boris getting a punch in isn't acceptable...
Do you really need this explained? Boris is for Brexit. He is bad. SKS was a remainer. He is good. Objectivity is in desuetude. That's the way it is.
So a politician criticising a politician is good or bad?
Politicians normally get as much criticism as they deserve, possibly a little less, but the maniacal hatred of this government which has resulted in hysterical hyperbole about every twist and turn of the virus and the second guessing and attempted undermining of every decision is driven by the B word. We can only hope we can get past this in the next few months.
A lot of the criticism of the government over the virus comes from Brexit supporters, so why do you see it as motivated by an attempt to undermine Brexit?
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I'm particularly amused to see Toby Young getting het up about the introduction of what he says are improperly-tested substances into the body. That's the same Toby Young who admits to having taken illegal drugs himself and supplied them to friends.
In fact, more generally there seem to be a lot of people (rather younger than Toby..) who are terribly concerned about additives in foods and making sure the smoothies they buy are organic, and yet who at the weekend swallow dodgy stuff, laced with God knows what, bought for cash from a criminal drug dealer.
I love lamb, turnips, beef and potatoes. Anyone who doesn't has been cooking them wrong!
Do you mean turnip or swede? It was several years in our house before we realised we were talking at cross purposes and that Scots call a Swede (the vegetable) a turnips. Confusingly they also call a turnip a turnip so I'm not sure how they tell the difference.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
An excuse to post this again. The factory that went from making engines for racing cars to producing ten thousand CPAP machines in a couple of weeks - before open-sourcing the whole project, down to the program files for the machine tools and 3D printers. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ij3g8kscdeA
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Bit early to say that. But Nicola's domination of our public space with almost daily "mother of the nation" broadcasts before an inept and sycophantic media is coming to an end, slowly.
Not sure places likes Czechia love this attitude.....they got all of 30 ventilators from the EU scheme when they needed them most, and in the end had to rely on places like Hungary to send them from their own supplies.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
498 new deaths in Germany yesterday and 15,898 new cases. But let's take our time with this and do it together.
174 deaths announced today in Sweden. Per capita, that's equivalent to 1134 here. Of course, these are spread over many days due to lag. Looking at the 22nd of November, it's gone from 12 to 20 to 27 to 32 to 37 to 54 since last Tuesday.
His race or nationality is completely fucking irrelevant.
He (and his wife) are brilliant scientists.
I’m disappointed that @Richard_Nabavi chose to highlight his Turkish links.
Err, I think you need a bit of a sense of humour reboot there. And since you are clearly a bit lacking in basic understanding of what was a very simple and harmless joke, the butt of the joke was the UK government, not the brilliant scientists, or the three countries I mentioned.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I visited Los Alamos and Oak Ridge in the 1980s and they still retained the aura of a Soviet factory town. Even Uncle Sam will collectivise when the chips are down. Not Uncle Don, though, sad to say.
I'm particularly amused to see Toby Young getting het up about the introduction of what he says are improperly-tested substances into the body. That's the same Toby Young who admits to having taken illegal drugs himself and supplied them to friends.
In fact, more generally there seem to be a lot of people (rather younger than Toby..) who are terribly concerned about additives in foods and making sure the smoothies they buy are organic, and yet who at the weekend swallow dodgy stuff, laced with God knows what, bought for cash from a criminal drug dealer.
So legalise it so they don't buy from a criminal and know what they're taking.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
On vaccines I believe it will be the travel industry itself who will require evidence of vaccination before booking passengers on airlines and cruise ships, indeed I believe Qantas has already said as much
It may well be if you want to travel you have to have the vaccine, not by HMG dictate but commercial interests and conditions of travel
I love lamb, turnips, beef and potatoes. Anyone who doesn't has been cooking them wrong!
Do you mean turnip or swede? It was several years in our house before we realised we were talking at cross purposes and that Scots call a Swede (the vegetable) a turnips. Confusingly they also call a turnip a turnip so I'm not sure how they tell the difference.
Wrong kind of turnip juice might explain the actions of one PB regular....
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
And good on yer. It's also, I would imagine, giving you pause for thought about Right Populism itself. If the bunch of people most associated with it are guilty of this monstrosity - and it is, I agree with you, a monstrosity - then you have to question its value. Could its deepest essence be vehicle for charlatans?
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Bit early to say that. But Nicola's domination of our public space with almost daily "mother of the nation" broadcasts before an inept and sycophantic media is coming to an end, slowly.
95% of the press and our state broadcaster are pro union, or at the very least indy/SNP sceptic. Do you think the ineptness and sycophancy is correlation or causation?
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
I love lamb, turnips, beef and potatoes. Anyone who doesn't has been cooking them wrong!
Do you mean turnip or swede? It was several years in our house before we realised we were talking at cross purposes and that Scots call a Swede (the vegetable) a turnips. Confusingly they also call a turnip a turnip so I'm not sure how they tell the difference.
This is the first time I've been aware there is a difference.
I'm particularly amused to see Toby Young getting het up about the introduction of what he says are improperly-tested substances into the body. That's the same Toby Young who admits to having taken illegal drugs himself and supplied them to friends.
In fact, more generally there seem to be a lot of people (rather younger than Toby..) who are terribly concerned about additives in foods and making sure the smoothies they buy are organic, and yet who at the weekend swallow dodgy stuff, laced with God knows what, bought for cash from a criminal drug dealer.
So legalise it so they don't buy from a criminal and know what they're taking.
There's a case for that, certainly. I'm not sure it has been demonstrated to be a strong case compared with the downsides, although in a couple of years we'll have some good data from Canada and various US states.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Actually the point that Brexit has enabled us to approve and therefore roll out the vaccine slightly more quickly is a valid one. We have, ladies and gentlemen, found the first and almost certainly the last actual positive of Brexit.
You must know the last point is daft - the ability to make quicker decisions will manifest itself as a benefit many times in the future, on many issues.
Really? Such as?
You're only limited by your imagination.
If you can't think of any examples when making quick decisions can be a benefit then I think your imagination is weak. I've long argued for nimbleness and agility as a strength.
The idea that the UK is going to be consistently nimble and agile is somewhat fanciful. We haven't exactly been nimble and agile in reforming taxation, or social care, or the NHS, or dealing with the decline of the High Street, or dealing with US mega-corporations abusing international tax rule, or setting up the computer systems and customs infrastructure for Brexit in 3 weeks time. And it certainly will never be nimble and agile under Boris - he's an even bigger ditherer than Brown.
The UK won't be led by Boris Johnson forever, we hold elections every 4-5 years and if you want a change then you can change the government every 4-5 years (or sooner if no confidence etc happens).
If Starmer has a bright idea that can improve the country and he puts that forward rather than abstaining on it then the country can choose to vote for him easier than we can reform 28 nations of the EU.
Not really, because so many things in the modern world involve negotiations with other countries. The EU speeds that up, not slows it down.
But the EU doesn't always want what we want.
We don't always want what 'we' want either.
Much better just to agree to whatever the EU thinks it wants then?
The EU is a polity. If we're part of it, then we're part of it. There's no us and them unless we leave.
Nonsense, there is always us and them. There are layers of us and them. Atomisation exists at multiple levels.
Do you think that because they're part of the UK that Nicola Sturgeon is the same "us" as Boris Johnson?
Are you part of the same "us" as me?
In this equation you are an individual voter, the UK is an amalgamation of all UK voters, and the EU is an amalgamation of all EU voters. It's perfectly possible that what you want is more aligned with the collective EU than with the collective UK.
Its possible but not true on average since your vote is greatly watered down by the 27 other nations in Europe, whereas on average across the UK your vote counts much, much more.
What crap. Under our system most votes don’t count at all. My votes for the EP were some of the few in my lifetime that ever counted for anything.
I love lamb, turnips, beef and potatoes. Anyone who doesn't has been cooking them wrong!
Do you mean turnip or swede? It was several years in our house before we realised we were talking at cross purposes and that Scots call a Swede (the vegetable) a turnips. Confusingly they also call a turnip a turnip so I'm not sure how they tell the difference.
This is the first time I've been aware there is a difference.
a) Big orange/purple balls, orange inside = Swede (English), Turnip (Scottish) b) Little white/purple balls, white inside = Turnip (English), Turnip (Scottish)
a) lovely, b) boring unless you are some fancy chef.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
If you got in control of the Tories I'd be more likely to join the Liberal Democrats thank you very much. But your <9% of the national vote vision of the Conservative Party is not the Parties, nor is it the Party manifesto - so yes you're full of crap.
A deal yes, but a deal that respects our right to set our own laws and control our own money is literally the first and second commitments of the 2019 election winning manifesto as opposed to the 2019 <9% of the vote losing manifesto.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Bit early to say that. But Nicola's domination of our public space with almost daily "mother of the nation" broadcasts before an inept and sycophantic media is coming to an end, slowly.
95% of the press and our state broadcaster are pro union, or at the very least indy/SNP sceptic. Do you think the ineptness and sycophancy is correlation or causation?
I wouldn't agree with your numbers but the Scottish media have been a problem for a long time, well before the SNP dominance. I remember when Henry McLeish was at the capers with his office rent and seemed to be surviving quite happily until he had one interview on Newsnight with a real journalist and had to resign.
Why are our media not asking why every part of Scotland is at least 1 and typically 2 tiers higher than they should be according the government's own standards with horrendous economic consequences? and collapsed businesses?
Why are our media not just laughing at a Scottish government which is so duplicitous that they try to make the £500 bonus being "tax free" a wedge issue when grossing the payment up to achieve that is entirely in their control and would have zero net cost?
Why is Nicola ever asked anything except why she is refusing to disclose the advice that she got from her Lord Advocate that the Salmond Judicial Review was indefensible at a cost to the Scottish tax payer of over £500K despite 2 votes by Parliament requiring her to do so?
When are they going to ask what Lord Mulholland is doing still being on the bench after costing Scottish taxpayers £10m+ for the first ever finding of malicious prosecution by Crown Office in its proud and long history?
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
Even accepting Toby's points (I know, but bear with me) he should surely still be in favour of the vaccine being made available: 1. the vaccines have been shown to be very effective at reducing those false positives. Given the pandemic is entirely/mostly a pandemic of somehow infectious false positives, that still ends the pandemic and all restrictions will therefore be able to end. WIN 2. there's hardly any disease circulating anyway, so hardly anyone affected. NEUTRAL/MINOR LOSS 3. only stupid people will take the vaccine, infertility will therefore give Toby his desired IQ-basd eugenics programme. WIN 4. see above, kills people stupid enough to take the vaccine, reduces stupidity more quickly. WIN 5. see above, smart people obviously won't take the vaccine for years, so only stupid people affected. WIN (unless vaccine extends life for the stupid people, but we know that's not true, see points 1-4)
Overall: BIGLY WIN from vaccination programme
It is amazing that anyone claiming any degree of scientific expertise can make the claim that the vaccine trial results are invalidated by false positives, when in fact it's the loony false-positive nonsense that is invalidated by the trials.
If the positive tests aren't caused by the disease, why on earth should they be prevented by a vaccine against the disease?
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Bit early to say that. But Nicola's domination of our public space with almost daily "mother of the nation" broadcasts before an inept and sycophantic media is coming to an end, slowly.
How have the Scottish media reacted to the blantant politicising of the healthcare workers’ bonus announcement?
Actually the point that Brexit has enabled us to approve and therefore roll out the vaccine slightly more quickly is a valid one. We have, ladies and gentlemen, found the first and almost certainly the last actual positive of Brexit.
You must know the last point is daft - the ability to make quicker decisions will manifest itself as a benefit many times in the future, on many issues.
Really? Such as?
You're only limited by your imagination.
If you can't think of any examples when making quick decisions can be a benefit then I think your imagination is weak. I've long argued for nimbleness and agility as a strength.
The idea that the UK is going to be consistently nimble and agile is somewhat fanciful. We haven't exactly been nimble and agile in reforming taxation, or social care, or the NHS, or dealing with the decline of the High Street, or dealing with US mega-corporations abusing international tax rule, or setting up the computer systems and customs infrastructure for Brexit in 3 weeks time. And it certainly will never be nimble and agile under Boris - he's an even bigger ditherer than Brown.
The UK won't be led by Boris Johnson forever, we hold elections every 4-5 years and if you want a change then you can change the government every 4-5 years (or sooner if no confidence etc happens).
If Starmer has a bright idea that can improve the country and he puts that forward rather than abstaining on it then the country can choose to vote for him easier than we can reform 28 nations of the EU.
Not really, because so many things in the modern world involve negotiations with other countries. The EU speeds that up, not slows it down.
But the EU doesn't always want what we want.
We don't always want what 'we' want either.
Much better just to agree to whatever the EU thinks it wants then?
The EU is a polity. If we're part of it, then we're part of it. There's no us and them unless we leave.
Nonsense, there is always us and them. There are layers of us and them. Atomisation exists at multiple levels.
Do you think that because they're part of the UK that Nicola Sturgeon is the same "us" as Boris Johnson?
Are you part of the same "us" as me?
In this equation you are an individual voter, the UK is an amalgamation of all UK voters, and the EU is an amalgamation of all EU voters. It's perfectly possible that what you want is more aligned with the collective EU than with the collective UK.
Its possible but not true on average since your vote is greatly watered down by the 27 other nations in Europe, whereas on average across the UK your vote counts much, much more.
What crap. Under our system most votes don’t count at all. My votes for the EP were some of the few in my lifetime that ever counted for anything.
That does not negate the point being made that your vote in an EU election was worth the square root of fuck all. If it counted for anything then all those who voted Brexit Party for a laugh last year might not have been so cavalier with their ballot paper.
To be fair, "monetizing every opportunity" is where the air travel industry has led for many decades - I learned the concept of maximizing consumer surplus extraction at business school from air travel industry examples.
But agreed, this is awful timing for adding new fees, even if such fees might enable them to reduce/keep costs down more generally.
They haven't picked up on the German health minister's point - the EU decided to approve vaccines collectively - unanimously or by QMV? If the latter, then Brexit may have played a role in expediting UK approval.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
Its a silly question, we should be pretty confident it isnt 100% safe, nothing really is, too many bananas will kill you, a few nuts can fill quite a few of us.
The high level questions are broadly, is it good for society for people to take the vaccine, and perhaps is it good for particular individuals to take the vaccine. The answers are a very clear yes to the first, and a pretty clear yes for most to the second.
It probably isn't necessary to vaccinate everyone. Where did this idea come from?
The idea comes from deep in the British psyche with its majority preference that everything should be either compulsory or forbidden. The only thing which saves us from this insanity is the degree of difference over which things fall into which category. Apart from that piece of luck PB would be either compulsory or forbidden by now.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
I'm content that it has passed the same level of scrutiny as any other vaccine I've had, including this years flu shot. Its impossible to guarantee 100% safety, but its been in tens of thousands of arm already, with no concerns so far. I'd take it now if I could.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Bit early to say that. But Nicola's domination of our public space with almost daily "mother of the nation" broadcasts before an inept and sycophantic media is coming to an end, slowly.
95% of the press and our state broadcaster are pro union, or at the very least indy/SNP sceptic. Do you think the ineptness and sycophancy is correlation or causation?
I wouldn't agree with your numbers but the Scottish media have been a problem for a long time, well before the SNP dominance. I remember when Henry McLeish was at the capers with his office rent and seemed to be surviving quite happily until he had one interview on Newsnight with a real journalist and had to resign.
Why are our media not asking why every part of Scotland is at least 1 and typically 2 tiers higher than they should be according the government's own standards with horrendous economic consequences? and collapsed businesses?
Why are our media not just laughing at a Scottish government which is so duplicitous that they try to make the £500 bonus being "tax free" a wedge issue when grossing the payment up to achieve that is entirely in their control and would have zero net cost?
Why is Nicola ever asked anything except why she is refusing to disclose the advice that she got from her Lord Advocate that the Salmond Judicial Review was indefensible at a cost to the Scottish tax payer of over £500K despite 2 votes by Parliament requiring her to do so?
When are they going to ask what Lord Mulholland is doing still being on the bench after costing Scottish taxpayers £10m+ for the first ever finding of malicious prosecution by Crown Office in its proud and long history?
So many stories, so little said.
What are your numbers on the Scottish press's indy/Union allegiances? I assume that you're not claiming that most of it is open minded about indy and supportive of the SNP?
Your view of what the the Scottish press should be seems somewhat DavidL tinged which is fair enough since you are DavidL. Short of you buying a media outfit I'm not sure what can be done about that though.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
No vaccine is 100% safe. Some (probably very few) will have an adverse reaction. When you vaccinate millions some will die - possibly because of the vaccine, or quite possibly because of something else, but the vaccine will get blamed - and the victims families will be on the front pages of the red-tops. For the population as a whole its an excellent idea. For a few very unfortunate individuals its a terrible one.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
As a portly male on the cusp (more or less) of 60, I'll take my chances.
I love lamb, turnips, beef and potatoes. Anyone who doesn't has been cooking them wrong!
Do you mean turnip or swede? It was several years in our house before we realised we were talking at cross purposes and that Scots call a Swede (the vegetable) a turnips. Confusingly they also call a turnip a turnip so I'm not sure how they tell the difference.
This is the first time I've been aware there is a difference.
a) Big orange/purple balls, orange inside = Swede (English), Turnip (Scottish) b) Little white/purple balls, white inside = Turnip (English), Turnip (Scottish)
a) lovely, b) boring unless you are some fancy chef.
The north of England also calls a swede a turnip. And they call a turnip a turnip. What they, and the Scots, make of Edward Thomas's poem 'Swedes' I cannot imagine. I never dared to ask.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
I'm sure that the vaccine has had extensive safety trials over months (when the vast majority of any adverse reactions occur within hours or days).
I'm sure that tens of thousands of people have had the vaccine in that time (a number comparable to a quarter of the adult population of Iceland have been vaccinated with one or another of the three vaccines that have now already proven efficacy) and been scrutinised like hawks for any adverse signs. This has included adults of all ages up to 85+ as well as those with a multitude of co-morbidities, including COPD, asthma, diabetes, and even Hepatitis and HIV.
I'm sure that the MHRA have gone over all the data (including a great deal that we haven't seen publicly) and borne all that in mind.
I'm sure that any residual risks of taking the vaccine are absurdly outweighed by the risk of infection-and-bad-outcome, even for those who aren't old or with co-morbidities.
Not even water is 100% safe, but the above is more than enough for me.
Is it really ripping off customers? The bun fights for luggage on some full cheap flights is overly stressful and also leads to delays. There is more luggage brought on than there is space for the luggage. Some of it has to go in the hold.
Rationing the space in advance via charges seems perfectly logical to me.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
Its a silly question, we should be pretty confident it isnt 100% safe, nothing really is, too many bananas will kill you, a few nuts can fill quite a few of us.
The high level questions are broadly, is it good for society for people to take the vaccine, and perhaps is it good for particular individuals to take the vaccine. The answers are a very clear yes to the first, and a pretty clear yes for most to the second.
I don't disagree. But it's important that someone asks the question. If it's 99% safe, say, and we vaccinate 60m people that is 600,000 people who would suffer ill-effects.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
No vaccine is 100% safe. Some (probably very few) will have an adverse reaction. When you vaccinate millions some will die - possibly because of the vaccine, or quite possibly because of something else, but the vaccine will get blamed - and the victims families will be on the front pages of the red-tops. For the population as a whole its an excellent idea. For a few very unfortunate individuals its a terrible one.
Careful, you're beginning to sound like a Tobyite Covid Let It Ripper.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
Its a silly question, we should be pretty confident it isnt 100% safe, nothing really is, too many bananas will kill you, a few nuts can fill quite a few of us.
The high level questions are broadly, is it good for society for people to take the vaccine, and perhaps is it good for particular individuals to take the vaccine. The answers are a very clear yes to the first, and a pretty clear yes for most to the second.
I don't disagree. But it's important that someone asks the question. If it's 99% safe, say, and we vaccinate 60m people that is 600,000 people who would suffer ill-effects.
Good idea, perhaps we could set up a regulator with leading scientists to approve such medicines.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
The deal has to be at the 59th minute of the 11th hour because it has to involve a betrayal of the headbangers and it is essential to Boris for it to be 'urgent' to get it through (with labour help) before it unravels under scrutiny, and, tomorrow being another day, the pieces start being picked up after 1st January.
It wasn't long ago that October 15th was the absolutely last possible moment for a deal. It passes almost without comment.
I get easily confused, is his job to supply vice to the government or try and keep the cabinet more under control?
Wasn't he tweeting yesterday that he had no idea about the exciting and interesting sexual shenanigans of the EU parliament (I wonder why)? Probably not vice then, unless posting fake pics on Twitter and pretending that you didn't say things that you did say are vices.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
The deal has to be at the 59th minute of the 11th hour because it has to involve a betrayal of the headbangers and it is essential to Boris for it to be 'urgent' to get it through (with labour help) before it unravels under scrutiny, and, tomorrow being another day, the pieces start being picked up after 1st January.
It wasn't long ago that October 15th was the absolutely last possible moment for a deal. It passes almost without comment.
The SNP are still in a position of phenomenal strength, however. Much more still to do.
The trend is Unionists friend however
Amazing how the tables have turned. I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
Its a silly question, we should be pretty confident it isnt 100% safe, nothing really is, too many bananas will kill you, a few nuts can fill quite a few of us.
The high level questions are broadly, is it good for society for people to take the vaccine, and perhaps is it good for particular individuals to take the vaccine. The answers are a very clear yes to the first, and a pretty clear yes for most to the second.
I don't disagree. But it's important that someone asks the question. If it's 99% safe, say, and we vaccinate 60m people that is 600,000 people who would suffer ill-effects.
It's important that the question is asked and answered as part of the approval process. Less so that it is also asked by randoms on the internet.
Actually the point that Brexit has enabled us to approve and therefore roll out the vaccine slightly more quickly is a valid one. We have, ladies and gentlemen, found the first and almost certainly the last actual positive of Brexit.
You must know the last point is daft - the ability to make quicker decisions will manifest itself as a benefit many times in the future, on many issues.
Really? Such as?
You're only limited by your imagination.
If you can't think of any examples when making quick decisions can be a benefit then I think your imagination is weak. I've long argued for nimbleness and agility as a strength.
The idea that the UK is going to be consistently nimble and agile is somewhat fanciful. We haven't exactly been nimble and agile in reforming taxation, or social care, or the NHS, or dealing with the decline of the High Street, or dealing with US mega-corporations abusing international tax rule, or setting up the computer systems and customs infrastructure for Brexit in 3 weeks time. And it certainly will never be nimble and agile under Boris - he's an even bigger ditherer than Brown.
The UK won't be led by Boris Johnson forever, we hold elections every 4-5 years and if you want a change then you can change the government every 4-5 years (or sooner if no confidence etc happens).
If Starmer has a bright idea that can improve the country and he puts that forward rather than abstaining on it then the country can choose to vote for him easier than we can reform 28 nations of the EU.
Not really, because so many things in the modern world involve negotiations with other countries. The EU speeds that up, not slows it down.
But the EU doesn't always want what we want.
We don't always want what 'we' want either.
Much better just to agree to whatever the EU thinks it wants then?
The EU is a polity. If we're part of it, then we're part of it. There's no us and them unless we leave.
Nonsense, there is always us and them. There are layers of us and them. Atomisation exists at multiple levels.
Do you think that because they're part of the UK that Nicola Sturgeon is the same "us" as Boris Johnson?
Are you part of the same "us" as me?
In this equation you are an individual voter, the UK is an amalgamation of all UK voters, and the EU is an amalgamation of all EU voters. It's perfectly possible that what you want is more aligned with the collective EU than with the collective UK.
Its possible but not true on average since your vote is greatly watered down by the 27 other nations in Europe, whereas on average across the UK your vote counts much, much more.
What crap. Under our system most votes don’t count at all. My votes for the EP were some of the few in my lifetime that ever counted for anything.
That does not negate the point being made that your vote in an EU election was worth the square root of fuck all. If it counted for anything then all those who voted Brexit Party for a laugh last year might not have been so cavalier with their ballot paper.
That's not true: many of us made good money off the European Elections.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
The deal has to be at the 59th minute of the 11th hour because it has to involve a betrayal of the headbangers and it is essential to Boris for it to be 'urgent' to get it through (with labour help) before it unravels under scrutiny, and, tomorrow being another day, the pieces start being picked up after 1st January.
It wasn't long ago that October 15th was the absolutely last possible moment for a deal. It passes almost without comment.
I assume the EU want last-minute as well. Boris and Ursula have met. You only get the head honchos to meet once a deal is done. I presume the current talks are cosmetic just to run down the clock.
Given there is a 78% chance of a deal with the EU according to the betting markets I suggest I may know something, if you wish to also be a No Deal diehard you too can go back to Farage
What do you class as a 'No deal die-hard'? If it's someone who desires a future where our trade with Europe is governed by the WTO, and there is no compromise on sovereignty, your term might be justified. If it's just someone who thinks we need to reserve the right to walk away, that's quite different - that's just the essence of negotiation. If the other side thinks you will not or cannot walk away, you're not going to get a great deal.
Personally I have no fear of a WTO Brexit, but I am minded that a deal would be good, if only to make people less fearful.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
No vaccine is 100% safe. Some (probably very few) will have an adverse reaction. When you vaccinate millions some will die - possibly because of the vaccine, or quite possibly because of something else, but the vaccine will get blamed - and the victims families will be on the front pages of the red-tops. For the population as a whole its an excellent idea. For a few very unfortunate individuals its a terrible one.
Careful, you're beginning to sound like a Tobyite Covid Let It Ripper.
For all we know the vaccine has the effect that every baby born to a vaccinated person will grow a second head at the age of five. It is not a knowable item. The laws of nature might change to render pure water highly poisonous too. Equally, global warming might heat us up just enough to save us from the next ice age and stop us all freezing to death.
Hume on induction and Popper on falsifiability remain sobering reading. But we are still here to tell the tale.
They haven't picked up on the German health minister's point - the EU decided to approve vaccines collectively - unanimously or by QMV? If the latter, then Brexit may have played a role in expediting UK approval.
I think you've misconstrued his point. He said that any EU member could have unilaterally given emergency authorisation but they haven't done this.
Toby and Yeadon are swinging to full-on antivax. Their latest is to call for the vaccine studies to be suspended, all data to be thrown out, and to blow up misinformation about antivaxxer fears.
At this point I think they should lock these arseholes up. Let them experience a real curtailment of liberty. They're now actively taking steps to get people killed.
Saw that coming 🙄
What are those idiots saying now?
- Suspend the studies immediately because the efficacy will be based on FALSE POSITIVES and throw out all the data because of FALSE POSITIVES - What about Antibody Dependent Enhancement? [Because obviously no-one's thought of that or run lengthy Phase 3 studies] - Spike proteins could make you INFERTILE!! [so what about people who've been infected with the actual virus?] - Many people could get fatal allergic reactions to it! 70% of people get antibodies to polyethylene glycol which is in the Pfizer one! [Yet, somehow, no-one in the tens of thousands in the safety studies had an issue] - It's all happened too fast and what about long-term effects! [Where all the genuine experts reckon that virtually all adverse effects happen within hours or days so any long-term problems would be incredibly unlikely]
Stoking all the fears of the antivaxxers. I'm genuinely now of the belief that these disgusting excuses for human beings should be jailed.
If the spike protein makes you infertile surely they want a hard lockdown now to ensure the virus is stamped out. Right? Right?
You can be anti-lockdown or anti-vax. To be against both is to be anti-logic.
They're 50% anti-lockdown, 50% anti-vax, and 100% pro-twat.
After pissing and whining for a whole year about how the only way out of the pandemic was herd immunity - even if it cost hundreds of thousands of lives - the moment a vaccine appears that gives us instant herd immunity without the fatalities, they effortlessly pivot to opposing it. Utter intellectual and ethical nullities.
But put yourself in their place. The anti-Lockdown argument was predicated on a good and timely vaccine being a unicorn. It has to be a bummer to see something you've been pushing for so long collapse in a heap. So a little empathy wouldn't go amiss. I mean, imagine if you had only just recently done a Great Blueington Declaration in the full glare of the media spotlight. You'd be really pissed off and looking to lash out at the thing that's rained on your parade. Which is this wretched vaccine.
I'm sure that explanation of their psychology is exactly right, but it doesn't change the profundity of the category error they're making. Staking out a contrarian position in regular political discourse - meaning just about everything other than wars, pandemics, and similar massive disasters - is perfectly fine and often admirable; doing so when it puts the lives and health of millions of your fellow citizens in danger is beneath contempt. As someone who is delighted to support the aims of libertarianism and right-populism in 99% of political circumstances, I spit on them for what they're doing now.
So when it doesn't matter you're happy to be a contrarian. But when it does you fold.
Gotit.
Yes. When the stakes are life and death, the parameters of political debate change fundamentally.
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
I respect that. But my concern with all of this - and I am certainly not an anti-vaxxer (it is just so illogical although I would like all my vaccines thoroughly tested) and could be said to be a lockdown segregationist - is the consensus, which I am nervous of.
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
I'm more than fine with questioning being done. It's a crucial component of science.
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
Are you sure the vaccine is 100% safe?
No but I'm fairly sure Covid isn't 100% safe. The balance of risk clearly lies with the vaccine, certainly from the viewpoint of 55 year old who gets free flu jabs.
Comments
As with the American version of many things, the libertarians in the rest of the world generally go WTF?
First: For him to "win", they need to abandon lockdowns and then see that no problems happen, either because there's no disease around or it's practically harmless. This way, everyone will credit the vaccine, so he can't prove he "wins."
Second: A decent chunk of his subscriber base are antivaxxer. He therefore has to give them antivaxxer fodder to support his subscriber base.
Either reason would be enough.
Also a swing from the SNP to the Tories and Labour on the Holyrood figures
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1334110445796532224?s=20
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/politics/three-coronavirus-vaccination-centres-cardiff-19346265
https://twitter.com/BrunoBrussels/status/1334128871617257476?s=20
https://twitter.com/AlexanderSmith/status/1334141435990446080?s=20
You're a military man - what's the value of a reality-denying form of contrarianism that tells people that the bombs that are falling on them aren't real? I'm a capitalist right up until the moment that we're fighting a war of survival - then I'm a socialist who'll happily tell the factory owners to stop making sports cars and start churning out tanks. Wars and pandemics have always suspended the individualist niceties of peacetime in favour of a necessary collectivism - an inversion of normality that should make us value our individualism all the more once peace returns.
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1334078572835823616?s=20
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/usercode.py?scotcontrol=Y&CON=39&LAB=38&LIB=8&Brexit=3&Green=3&UKIP=&TVCON=&TVLAB=&TVLIB=&TVBrexit=&TVGreen=&TVUKIP=&SCOTCON=19.3&SCOTLAB=19&SCOTLIB=5.7&SCOTBrexit=1&SCOTGreen=1.7&SCOTUKIP=&SCOTNAT=51.7&display=AllChanged&regorseat=(none)&boundary=2019
https://twitter.com/SavantaComRes/status/1334063907099594755?s=20
https://twitter.com/e_casalicchio/status/1334146171896524802
https://twitter.com/e_casalicchio/status/1334146282617712641
https://twitter.com/BrunoBrussels/status/1334144814296788998?s=20
In fact, more generally there seem to be a lot of people (rather younger than Toby..) who are terribly concerned about additives in foods and making sure the smoothies they buy are organic, and yet who at the weekend swallow dodgy stuff, laced with God knows what, bought for cash from a criminal drug dealer.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ij3g8kscdeA
Hence my admiration for our very own @contrarian here.
OK a war is pretty straightforward. Good guys (us) and bad guys (them). That I get. Like for example, oh I don't know, the Anglo-Burmese war over control of North Eastern India (wiki). That was an easy one, right? Or let's say one closer to home - Op Banner. Who are the good guys there? Or Iraq even?
So actually wars often no. And that's as you say when the bombs are dropping. Much is known about Covid 19 but far from everything. So everything needs to be questioned. Even if the questioning is done by an absolute spanner as seems to be the case here.
Of course, these are spread over many days due to lag. Looking at the 22nd of November, it's gone from 12 to 20 to 27 to 32 to 37 to 54 since last Tuesday.
https://twitter.com/HYUFD1/status/1334148272915689476
It may well be if you want to travel you have to have the vaccine, not by HMG dictate but commercial interests and conditions of travel
I fully admit that I regularly examined the entrails of >2014 indy polls, hoping that MOE changes were indicative of trends, though I hope I wasn't quite as transparently dumb as to publicly draw absolute conclusions about them.
Any word if Alliance for Unity has been officially recognised as a party yet? This Unionist in (checks notes) Hereford thinks George is your only hope.
https://twitter.com/MRRS71/status/1334105667473436678?s=20
The No Deal diehards can sod off to Farage
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/12/georgia-election-official-sterling-press-conference-trump-supporters-threats-fraud.html
It's when the answers are given to those questions and they're repeatedly ignored or deliberately distorted (again and again and again), and arguments put that are totally incoherent, inconsistent, and illogical - yet the arguer remains imperturbable in their rigid ignorance.
When the questioner, despite the overwhelming evidence and having all their questions fully answered, deliberately crusades for dangerous and deadly stupidity.
When they don't even have the moral courage to make the statements they want to make and take refuge in nudge-wink questions to try to imply what they don't want to say.
Stuff like that.
b) Little white/purple balls, white inside = Turnip (English), Turnip (Scottish)
a) lovely, b) boring unless you are some fancy chef.
A deal yes, but a deal that respects our right to set our own laws and control our own money is literally the first and second commitments of the 2019 election winning manifesto as opposed to the 2019 <9% of the vote losing manifesto.
Why are our media not asking why every part of Scotland is at least 1 and typically 2 tiers higher than they should be according the government's own standards with horrendous economic consequences? and collapsed businesses?
Why are our media not just laughing at a Scottish government which is so duplicitous that they try to make the £500 bonus being "tax free" a wedge issue when grossing the payment up to achieve that is entirely in their control and would have zero net cost?
Why is Nicola ever asked anything except why she is refusing to disclose the advice that she got from her Lord Advocate that the Salmond Judicial Review was indefensible at a cost to the Scottish tax payer of over £500K despite 2 votes by Parliament requiring her to do so?
When are they going to ask what Lord Mulholland is doing still being on the bench after costing Scottish taxpayers £10m+ for the first ever finding of malicious prosecution by Crown Office in its proud and long history?
So many stories, so little said.
If the positive tests aren't caused by the disease, why on earth should they be prevented by a vaccine against the disease?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55156512
But agreed, this is awful timing for adding new fees, even if such fees might enable them to reduce/keep costs down more generally.
They haven't picked up on the German health minister's point - the EU decided to approve vaccines collectively - unanimously or by QMV? If the latter, then Brexit may have played a role in expediting UK approval.
I preferred him when he was Rula Lenska's cat.
The high level questions are broadly, is it good for society for people to take the vaccine, and perhaps is it good for particular individuals to take the vaccine. The answers are a very clear yes to the first, and a pretty clear yes for most to the second.
Your view of what the the Scottish press should be seems somewhat DavidL tinged which is fair enough since you are DavidL. Short of you buying a media outfit I'm not sure what can be done about that though.
"Relearning How to Read in the Age of Social Media
written by Joe Nutt"
https://quillette.com/2020/11/30/relearning-how-to-read-in-the-age-of-social-media/
I'm sure that tens of thousands of people have had the vaccine in that time (a number comparable to a quarter of the adult population of Iceland have been vaccinated with one or another of the three vaccines that have now already proven efficacy) and been scrutinised like hawks for any adverse signs. This has included adults of all ages up to 85+ as well as those with a multitude of co-morbidities, including COPD, asthma, diabetes, and even Hepatitis and HIV.
I'm sure that the MHRA have gone over all the data (including a great deal that we haven't seen publicly) and borne all that in mind.
I'm sure that any residual risks of taking the vaccine are absurdly outweighed by the risk of infection-and-bad-outcome, even for those who aren't old or with co-morbidities.
Not even water is 100% safe, but the above is more than enough for me.
Rationing the space in advance via charges seems perfectly logical to me.
Point two. Yes we do.
Point three. No deal diehards own Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party.
then maybe the Tory Party ain't for you!
It wasn't long ago that October 15th was the absolutely last possible moment for a deal. It passes almost without comment.
(Ducks and waits to be proved wrong)
Personally I have no fear of a WTO Brexit, but I am minded that a deal would be good, if only to make people less fearful.
https://twitter.com/Tpopularfront/status/1334117842233532417
Hume on induction and Popper on falsifiability remain sobering reading. But we are still here to tell the tale.