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.
Great idea. I'm on board. But these people are not infallible. As I hope we have seen these past eight 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 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.
Yes there's lots we don't know but it remains the case that people should be encouraged to question everything. And if it's just random blokes on the internet why is everyone so in a tizzy about it?
Yes, we delivered Brexit as per the referendum in January, we now need a trade deal with the EU. The No Deal diehards can sod off to Farage
Not quite sure that young HY is completely on top of his brief here. I am not convinced that every one of the No Deal Diehards is a sodomite. But I suppose he knows them rather better than I do.
But apart from that, is he really on message? Everybody knows that the Conservative Party is a unholy coalition of warring factions. If a large chunk of them go over to Farage, and perhaps the more Liberal Conservatives then move over to the Lib Dems (which would probably be a more suitable home for them), that leaves only the opportunists in the Real Conservative Party. They can be "the most successful election winning machine in history" all by themselves.
Still can't comment on PB via Vanilla on my iphone, only laptop
‘tis simply karma for all the tweets you have spammed up here that slow down the site for the rest of us, about which you cared not a jot.
That is up to Vanilla and administrators, there are still plenty of tweets on here, that is rather a different matter to not being able to login at all on iphone
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.
(Ducks and waits to be proved wrong)
Logically it is perfectly possible that there will be no deal. If the EU decides that the ensuing disruption is not as bad as endangering the SM to an unacceptable degree, and the UK decides likewise with regard to sovereignty, then there will be no deal.
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.
Just on that, since it's got me thinking, assuming PB.com was to become by Decree of Law either forbidden or mandatory, I wonder for which of those two options could be made the strongest case? It's a tricky assessment but I'd say forbidden. I think the net harm to the general population could be significant if we went the mandatory route.
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.
For that reason we should have a scientific study of the effect of giving the vaccine to 10Ks of people. And careful monitor the effects. Then using the laws of probability we can determine safety to x number of 9s.
And before we do that, do some basic trials so that we can be sure that it is pretty safe, before we give it to our 10ks of volunteers.
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.
What's the latest information on the survival rate for Covid-19?
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.
(Ducks and waits to be proved wrong)
Logically it is perfectly possible that there will be no deal. If the EU decides that the ensuing disruption is not as bad as endangering the SM to an unacceptable degree, and the UK decides likewise with regard to sovereignty, then there will be no deal.
Quite so, I assume the 'no deal if necessary and accept the short term pain' geese accept that it's the same sauce for the EU gander?
Where would you be happy to see the UK compromise? LPF? Fish? Governance?
A deal that ends free movement, and allows us to do our own trade deals, gets back a bit of fishing waters is fine and in line with the manifesto, dying in a ditch over LPF arrangements even Canada has to abide by is not.
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?
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.
Yes there's lots we don't know but it remains the case that people should be encouraged to question everything. And if it's just random blokes on the internet why is everyone so in a tizzy about it?
Yes but. Regulation exists to do difficult science and testing as well as possible on behalf of those who did PPE, Classics or Old Norse instead of science subjects. Their record isn't bad. The only people I know in my bit of the real (northern, working class, industrial, agricultural) world who are in a tizzy about it are the sorts of people who swallow every conspiracy theory already - like those who believe Trump is a good man who won the 2020 election.
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.
What, so any of the 27 could have chosen to be "nimble" but they collectively choose to be "sclerotic" instead?
Yes, we delivered Brexit as per the referendum in January, we now need a trade deal with the EU. The No Deal diehards can sod off to Farage
Not quite sure that young HY is completely on top of his brief here. I am not convinced that every one of the No Deal Diehards is a sodomite. But I suppose he knows them rather better than I do.
But apart from that, is he really on message? Everybody knows that the Conservative Party is a unholy coalition of warring factions. If a large chunk of them go over to Farage, and perhaps the more Liberal Conservatives then move over to the Lib Dems (which would probably be a more suitable home for them), that leaves only the opportunists in the Real Conservative Party. They can be "the most successful election winning machine in history" all by themselves.
For my part, I would not mind seeing that happen.
It is just the same as the Corbynistas who are now voting Green, the No Deal diehards can equally vote for Farage
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.
What, so any of the 27 could have chosen to be "nimble" but they collectively choose to be "sclerotic" instead?
Yes, plus they lack the strength, skills and expertise of our independent MHRA.
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.
Gorgeous George is a dreadful opportunist. George as a pro-union unity candidate? What a joke, George couldn't spell unity.
I preferred him when he was Rula Lenska's cat.
He's a brand in steep decline. Really thrashing about for attention now.
He is an amazing public speaker. If he'd been born a hundred years earlier he'd probably have become Prime Minister.
If he'd been born a hundred years earlier as a working class kid from Dundee he'd have been lucky to have lived into adulthood! Agreed though, he is a fearsomely effective debater.
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.
(Ducks and waits to be proved wrong)
Logically it is perfectly possible that there will be no deal. If the EU decides that the ensuing disruption is not as bad as endangering the SM to an unacceptable degree, and the UK decides likewise with regard to sovereignty, then there will be no deal.
Quite so, I assume the 'no deal if necessary and accept the short term pain' geese accept that it's the same sauce for the EU gander?
The issue is the fact people believe the pain will be short term - it won't be.
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.
You think the trial with 20,000 people receiving the vaccine demonstrated only 99% safety?
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?
Nothing is 100% safe, but it's massively safer than a potential Covid infection.
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.
Just on that, since it's got me thinking, assuming PB.com was to become by Decree of Law either forbidden or mandatory, I wonder for which of those two options could be made the strongest case? It's a tricky assessment but I'd say forbidden. I think the net harm to the general population could be significant if we went the mandatory route.
Yes. It would increase the supply of pointless comments to such an extent that, like middle eastern history, it could not all be consumed locally.
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.
Great idea. I'm on board. But these people are not infallible. As I hope we have seen these past eight months.
Fine, lets set up two bodies, one the regulator with leading scientists, and as a failsafe, another one with a load of twitterati who get paid on the basis of how outrageous their opinions are.....
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.
What's the latest information on the survival rate for Covid-19?
What age? It changes drastically on age.
If you're, say, 55, it's about 0.4% mortality if infected. At 65, it's about 1.35% fatal At 45, it's about 0.12% fatal.
For being sick enough to need hospitalisation (in order to save your life), look at about triple that chance at the lower and and five times that chance at the older end.
The chance of long-term debilitating effects are unknown, but somewhere between 2% and 5%.
As you get younger, of course, the chances improve; older, and they worsen drastically.
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.
Great idea. I'm on board. But these people are not infallible. As I hope we have seen these past eight months.
What have we seen over the last eight months to make you doubt the judgement of the MHRA ?
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.
You think the trial with 20,000 people receiving the vaccine demonstrated only 99% safety?
Has Toby Young been helping you with your sums?
20,000 people trialling the virus and no serious adverse reactions in any of those 20,000.
That's a touch more than 99% safety. Puts serious adverse reaction safety at probably at least 99.995% and maybe more - I'll take that thank you.
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.
You think the trial with 20,000 people receiving the vaccine demonstrated only 99% safety?
Has Toby Young been helping you with your sums?
I think Pfizer was 40k participants and yes, fully agree. The safety rating isn't going to be anything like 99%, that would have been visible in the PII and PIII trials and it would have been halted. If there are serious side effects we haven't yet seen it will be something like 0.001% of cases which would be 550 eligible people in the UK. I'd be shocked if it was that high, all three vaccines use the same spike protein to get an immune response so the sample size is actually 20k from AZ, 40k from Pfizer and 30k from Moderna and there hasn't been a single report of serious side effects.
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.
Just on that, since it's got me thinking, assuming PB.com was to become by Decree of Law either forbidden or mandatory, I wonder for which of those two options could be made the strongest case? It's a tricky assessment but I'd say forbidden. I think the net harm to the general population could be significant if we went the mandatory route.
Yes. It would increase the supply of pointless comments to such an extent that, like middle eastern history, it could not all be consumed locally.
The reposted tweets would crash the site within five minutes. Making it run reliably would consume 0.7% of GDP.
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.
What, so any of the 27 could have chosen to be "nimble" but they collectively choose to be "sclerotic" instead?
Yes, plus they lack the strength, skills and expertise of our independent MHRA.
Can picture you bashing that one out, superior jingoey expression on face.
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.
For that reason we should have a scientific study of the effect of giving the vaccine to 10Ks of people. And careful monitor the effects. Then using the laws of probability we can determine safety to x number of 9s.
And before we do that, do some basic trials so that we can be sure that it is pretty safe, before we give it to our 10ks of volunteers.
And that is what was done.
As I said, I am far from an anti-vaxxer and if a vaccination was sitting in front of me instead of my cup of coffee I would take it. But I dislike the ridicule heaped upon people who ask questions.
If I said the earth was flat, say, no one would spend a moment telling me what an idiot I was. So I can't see why people are so vexed, if not vaxxed by Young. Ignore him. But someone needs to ask questions because, and you seem to have answered his comprehensively.
But think of where we would be if no one had asked any questions through the past nine months of our crisis.
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.
What, so any of the 27 could have chosen to be "nimble" but they collectively choose to be "sclerotic" instead?
Yes, plus they lack the strength, skills and expertise of our independent MHRA.
Can picture you bashing that one out, superior jingoey expression on face.
Didn't even have to wait for next week for the Sweden trending downwards mob to be humiliated again. Massive dump of updates pushes the peak from 39 to 54.
Yes, we delivered Brexit as per the referendum in January, we now need a trade deal with the EU. The No Deal diehards can sod off to Farage
Not quite sure that young HY is completely on top of his brief here. I am not convinced that every one of the No Deal Diehards is a sodomite. But I suppose he knows them rather better than I do.
But apart from that, is he really on message? Everybody knows that the Conservative Party is a unholy coalition of warring factions. If a large chunk of them go over to Farage, and perhaps the more Liberal Conservatives then move over to the Lib Dems (which would probably be a more suitable home for them), that leaves only the opportunists in the Real Conservative Party. They can be "the most successful election winning machine in history" all by themselves.
For my part, I would not mind seeing that happen.
It is just the same as the Corbynistas who are now voting Green, the No Deal diehards can equally vote for Farage
Except that Starmer (despite being pretty left-wing when it comes to it) has largely hoovered up the centre-left vote. He can shrug if a few lefties drift off the other end.
Johnson has chosen to repel or expel his centrist dad types (evidence: the ex Conservative members here), and a badly-run Canada deal is unlikely to win them back in large numbers. So he's much more dependent on Johnson/Farage floaters.
In the same way that the US Republicans simultaneously need to disown Trump and can't risk doing so, Johnson needs to disappoint the fruitcake wing, but he can't really afford for them to sod off to Farage.
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.
What, so any of the 27 could have chosen to be "nimble" but they collectively choose to be "sclerotic" instead?
Yes, plus they lack the strength, skills and expertise of our independent MHRA.
Can picture you bashing that one out, superior jingoey expression on face.
You're weird.
Its just a matter of fact.
I'm just intuiting that you would enjoy typing out such a sentence, that's all.
"They lack the X Y and Z that we have in such abundance."
I wonder if Ross, 'A man, father, husband, living in the woods in the South of England', is keen on the vaxx?
Pinning what look like real candles to your Christmas tree branches a la Queen Victoria doesn't seem very cautious to me. Unless there's a footman out of shot with a fire hose and a bucket of sand.
I wonder if Ross, 'A man, father, husband, living in the woods in the South of England', is keen on the vaxx?
Pinning what look like real candles to your Christmas tree branches a la Queen Victoria doesn't seem very cautious to me. Unless there's a footman out of shot with a fire hose and a bucket of sand.
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.
Great idea. I'm on board. But these people are not infallible. As I hope we have seen these past eight months.
Fine, lets set up two bodies, one the regulator with leading scientists, and as a failsafe, another one with a load of twitterati who get paid on the basis of how outrageous their opinions are.....
We have had leading scientists, and their reporting and their recommendations and their charts, from day one. I don't see why they should escape interrogation.
All we did was authorize its use, no great human achievement compared to those that developed it. OTT by government ministers.
They’ve signed us up to be Guinea Pigs in the great Beta Trial. Whilst the rest of the World cautiously watch on, the Great British spirit will carry us through. We won the war you know. Both of them. And Waterloo. And Agincourt.
Mugs go on sale tomorrow saying I support Sharma volunteering himself and us all for the B Ark.
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But apart from that, is he really on message? Everybody knows that the Conservative Party is a unholy coalition of warring factions. If a large chunk of them go over to Farage, and perhaps the more Liberal Conservatives then move over to the Lib Dems (which would probably be a more suitable home for them), that leaves only the opportunists in the Real Conservative Party. They can be "the most successful election winning machine in history" all by themselves.
For my part, I would not mind seeing that happen.
And before we do that, do some basic trials so that we can be sure that it is pretty safe, before we give it to our 10ks of volunteers.
And that is what was done.
A deal that ends free movement, and allows us to do our own trade deals, gets back a bit of fishing waters is fine and in line with the manifesto, dying in a ditch over LPF arrangements even Canada has to abide by is not.
https://twitter.com/tconnellyRTE/status/1334163771426791434?s=20
Has Toby Young been helping you with your sums?
That's what happens when you negotiate with another party that holds all the cards and we hold Pocket Aces.
It changes drastically on age.
If you're, say, 55, it's about 0.4% mortality if infected.
At 65, it's about 1.35% fatal
At 45, it's about 0.12% fatal.
For being sick enough to need hospitalisation (in order to save your life), look at about triple that chance at the lower and and five times that chance at the older end.
The chance of long-term debilitating effects are unknown, but somewhere between 2% and 5%.
As you get younger, of course, the chances improve; older, and they worsen drastically.
https://twitter.com/rossathome/status/1334154223467040773?s=20
I wonder if Ross, 'A man, father, husband, living in the woods in the South of England', is keen on the vaxx?
That's a touch more than 99% safety. Puts serious adverse reaction safety at probably at least 99.995% and maybe more - I'll take that thank you.
Making it run reliably would consume 0.7% of GDP.
NEW THREAD
https://twitter.com/hildabast/status/1333985737927057410
If I said the earth was flat, say, no one would spend a moment telling me what an idiot I was. So I can't see why people are so vexed, if not vaxxed by Young. Ignore him. But someone needs to ask questions because, and you seem to have answered his comprehensively.
But think of where we would be if no one had asked any questions through the past nine months of our crisis.
Its just a matter of fact.
Johnson has chosen to repel or expel his centrist dad types (evidence: the ex Conservative members here), and a badly-run Canada deal is unlikely to win them back in large numbers. So he's much more dependent on Johnson/Farage floaters.
In the same way that the US Republicans simultaneously need to disown Trump and can't risk doing so, Johnson needs to disappoint the fruitcake wing, but he can't really afford for them to sod off to Farage.
"They lack the X Y and Z that we have in such abundance."
Where X and Y and Z are Good Things.
Mugs go on sale tomorrow saying I support Sharma volunteering himself and us all for the B Ark.