One of hundreds of posts like this again at the Daily Mall today.
"Klingklang, Small town in Suffolk, United Kingdom
"There is a 6 minute video posted yesterday on Brand New Tube. A fellow went around Croydon hospital with his camera hidden. The whole place was deserted. The a & e which would normally be bursting had about 10 people in the waiting room. The a & e treatment area was empty. This is a crime against humanity as others who need cancer surgery etc are left to waste away. Those who need a & e have been purposely scared to not go. We are being lied to and most of the population believes the force fed lies."
Do any of these posts suggest a reason why the illuminati (or whoever) want to stop people getting A&E treatment?
Or why they all powerful state allows you to visit, just not with an open camera, to reveal its lies?
The Great Replacement Plan.
The One World Government wants native white folk to die so they can be replaced by darkies/immigrants/Muslims.
Last week I learnt about the phrase "Race Suicide" as used in America at the turn of the last century.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
Could have left it at that. The rest is also relevant for undermining the conspiracy (not least why all those different world governments, many of whom despise one another, are cooperating on this, so it is not No.10), but it falls down at this very basic point.
One other thing that bewilders me is... what the hell are people thinking when they link directly to a site that literally says the opposite of what they claim?
The link he posted showed that deaths were way higher than the years he mentioned.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
They are just so monumentally, unbelievably, incurably shit. Our daughter was due to go back to school in four days' time, now she isn't. People are catching Covid left right and centre round here - my eldest tested positive last week - it was blindingly obvious that the schools shouldn't be opening. But rather than giving families and schools time to prepare, they're running around like headless chickens, changing policy at the last minute. Fucking clueless wankers.
I cannot see it being realistic for schools to be going back this month, anywhere. It's spreading everywhere.
One one hand, better to take the decision now rather than Monday.
On the other, my abiding memory of March is that we were scrabbling down a landslide, hoping that each measure would be sufficient to regain control and then finding it wasn't.
That sense hasn't really gone away, but it's getting more intense again.
We are absolutely there. Ths is March all over again.
The correct time to have locked everything down was a month ago but the next best time is right the fuck now.
Hell, we've been playing catchup since September. And I can't shake of the nagging doubt that, had the case levels been lower in the autumn, the odds of Supercovid not mutating into existence would have been a lot lower.
If you keep tickling the dragon's tail...
We could, I think, have got away with restrictions in September. Because we didn't we needed lockdown. Because we didn't lockdown we need lockdown+ now.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on.
We have Gavin Williamson in the Gov't in charge of the schools, the idea there is some overarching conspiracy going on is even more insane than the fervent belief Trumpers have that he won the election.
“Almost three times as many under 60s died in road crashes last year as those without health conditions killed by coronavirus, NHS data shows."
For under-20s, it's more akin to the chances of being killed by lighting. Quick, we need new precautions to stop lighting strikes.
Great, so we’re just going to throw the under 60s /with/ underlying conditions under the nearest coronavirus-laden bus then? I’ll be sure my friends with congenital diabetes & asthma will be delighted to hear that the Telegraph doesn’t believe their lives are worth protecting, so long as the true-blooded Aryan youth of the nation survive.
The Telegraph really has gone mask-off fascist, hasn’t it?
Considering as well that the definition of “underlying health condition” includes over 25% of all adults, that’s gonna have to be a big bus, as well.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
I once asked one such, that given the apparent genius of The Securocrats, surely they were the best possible rulers of Northern Ireland? If they could perfectly manipulate everyone all the time, what was the point in opposing them?
It is quite a relief to know the all powerful state is so in control. They are so amazing they manage to pretend that practically every large organisation is an absolute jumbled mess, and that they swing from crisis to crisis with a mixture of bluff, bravado and desperation. It's very convincing.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Sadly mine is full of dog food.
Can he use the microwave? Otherwise I see a problem further down the road.
He doesn't need the microwave, but will stumble at the earlier hurdle of opening the freezer.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
But isn't this likely to people waiting until after Christmas to get tested? And the fact that the test-by-mail facility was closed for a few days?
Is “Teachers’ Union Boss doesn’t like Education Secretary” really ever news?
This is worse. To take the teaching analogy;
The very best Ed Secs, like the very best teachers, are both ruthlessly efficient and able to exude bonhomie. You can get away with almost anything them. Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson, say.
You can do pretty well in both fields without the bonhomie as long as you are ruthlessly efficient. Michael Gove or Ed Balls.
You can also just about do OK without the ruthless efficiency as long as you can get enough goodwill. Estelle Morris, for example.
When you are both despised for being rubbish at your job and hated for being an awful person, you're stuffed. Which is where Gavster finds himself.
Surely there has to be a reshuffle now and he has to go. I think you can make a case for Priti but Williamson is just a very unfunny joke.
Would be good if he got no other job as a replacement, but Boris could always send him back to the whps if he must.
Only department he is any good for.
Given Supercovid I can't understand schools going back in January. Schools should go back ASAP but not Monday, but we should gear the entire nation for vaccinations for a few weeks.
Spot on Philip.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
I remember reading Matt Ridley on humans being grass's way of keeping itself a dominant plant order on Earth*. The same logic applies to dogs and humans, and the arachnid and its pet human Mr Williamson.
“Almost three times as many under 60s died in road crashes last year as those without health conditions killed by coronavirus, NHS data shows."
For under-20s, it's more akin to the chances of being killed by lighting. Quick, we need new precautions to stop lighting strikes.
Hospital wards are overflowing with the victims of lightening strikes? Funny that Foxy never mentioned this.
I’m also surprised at the idea people don’t take basic precautions against lightning strikes. I don’t shelter under tall or lone trees if a storm comes on when I’m out, nor do I use electrical equipment if I’m indoors.
US Senate override of Trump's veto of defense bill
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep = Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1) not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
Is “Teachers’ Union Boss doesn’t like Education Secretary” really ever news?
This is worse. To take the teaching analogy;
The very best Ed Secs, like the very best teachers, are both ruthlessly efficient and able to exude bonhomie. You can get away with almost anything them. Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson, say.
You can do pretty well in both fields without the bonhomie as long as you are ruthlessly efficient. Michael Gove or Ed Balls.
You can also just about do OK without the ruthless efficiency as long as you can get enough goodwill. Estelle Morris, for example.
When you are both despised for being rubbish at your job and hated for being an awful person, you're stuffed. Which is where Gavster finds himself.
Surely there has to be a reshuffle now and he has to go. I think you can make a case for Priti but Williamson is just a very unfunny joke.
Would be good if he got no other job as a replacement, but Boris could always send him back to the whps if he must.
Only department he is any good for.
Given Supercovid I can't understand schools going back in January. Schools should go back ASAP but not Monday, but we should gear the entire nation for vaccinations for a few weeks.
Spot on Philip.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
But isn't this likely to people waiting until after Christmas to get tested? And the fact that the test-by-mail facility was closed for a few days?
Tests on the 29th - 344,775 Tests on the 28th - 357,238 Tests on the 27th - 352,702 --Christmas and Boxing Day-- Test on the 24th - 463,123 Test on the 23rd - 509,507 Test on the 22nd - 453,903
So no. Considerably fewer tests performed after Christmas but a mass surge in positives.
“Almost three times as many under 60s died in road crashes last year as those without health conditions killed by coronavirus, NHS data shows."
For under-20s, it's more akin to the chances of being killed by lighting. Quick, we need new precautions to stop lighting strikes.
Hospital wards are overflowing with the victims of lightening strikes? Funny that Foxy never mentioned this.
I’m also surprised at the idea people don’t take basic precautions against lightning strikes. I don’t shelter under tall or lone trees if a storm comes on when I’m out, nor do I use electrical equipment if I’m indoors.
Given that 90% of those struck by lightning survive (believe it or not), I’m sure that many of the covidiots believe it’s not suitably dangerous to justify any measures.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Sadly mine is full of dog food.
I know some people go on some crazy diets for the new year, but never heard of that one.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
But isn't this likely to people waiting until after Christmas to get tested? And the fact that the test-by-mail facility was closed for a few days?
Tests on the 29th - 344,775 Tests on the 28th - 357,238 Tests on the 27th - 352,702 --Christmas and Boxing Day-- Test on the 24th - 463,123 Test on the 23rd - 509,507 Test on the 22nd - 453,903
So no. Considerably fewer tests performed after Christmas but a mass surge in positives.
OK. So my next hypothesis would be that a lot of the pre-Christmas tests would be precautionary, people wanting a negative before going to see relatives on Xmas Day, whereas only those with symptoms bothered to rush out for a test straight after the holidays.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
If Scotland voted to stay in the UK in a 2nd IndyRef after everything that has happened with Brexit then that will put the issue to bed for a long time. I think it's deluded to suggest that there will be a further 3rd and 4th referendum.
The best policy for Unionists is to finish what Blair started and failed to finish: give Scotland a final and sustainable long-term devolution settlement, just as @Gardenwalker suggests. Then have a IndyRef.
If a future Labour government wishes to do that fine, this Tory government respects the once in a generation 2014 vote
So why didn’t she want a deal with Europe then? No wonder the SNP want control of our drugs policy. Their leadership is on acid.
Yep, mystifying when only three weeks ago she was told that no deal ‘would be wonderful for the UK’. Imagine voting ‘for’ something that would be wonderful for the UK!
She may have been told that Divvie but she was adamant that that was ridiculous and then voted for it!
Only the mps that Scotland sends down to the animal house rather than Nicola of course.
Lead the UK, don’t leave it, as the empty appeal went.
No she indulged in the meaningless gesture of voting against the deal at Holyrood as well.
Not meaningless. It is very significant, as being a cross-party vote.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
And the really frustrating thing is that there are ~20million doses of the AZN vaccine almost ready to go, a good fraction just needing a final check.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
Is “Teachers’ Union Boss doesn’t like Education Secretary” really ever news?
This is worse. To take the teaching analogy;
The very best Ed Secs, like the very best teachers, are both ruthlessly efficient and able to exude bonhomie. You can get away with almost anything them. Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson, say.
You can do pretty well in both fields without the bonhomie as long as you are ruthlessly efficient. Michael Gove or Ed Balls.
You can also just about do OK without the ruthless efficiency as long as you can get enough goodwill. Estelle Morris, for example.
When you are both despised for being rubbish at your job and hated for being an awful person, you're stuffed. Which is where Gavster finds himself.
Surely there has to be a reshuffle now and he has to go. I think you can make a case for Priti but Williamson is just a very unfunny joke.
Would be good if he got no other job as a replacement, but Boris could always send him back to the whps if he must.
Only department he is any good for.
Given Supercovid I can't understand schools going back in January. Schools should go back ASAP but not Monday, but we should gear the entire nation for vaccinations for a few weeks.
Spot on Philip.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
When it’s much too late.
Why though? Are the whole cabinet really such idiots?
People will say "it's politics innit" but Johnson doing a crisis broadcast* to the country to say: 'we're going to put the country on hold for a month or even two while we absolutely focus on mass vaccinations' would gain widespread support and would be a wise move politically imo.
(*Minus the smirk and any attempts at schoolboy humour, please Boris.)
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
But isn't this likely to people waiting until after Christmas to get tested? And the fact that the test-by-mail facility was closed for a few days?
Tests on the 29th - 344,775 Tests on the 28th - 357,238 Tests on the 27th - 352,702 --Christmas and Boxing Day-- Test on the 24th - 463,123 Test on the 23rd - 509,507 Test on the 22nd - 453,903
So no. Considerably fewer tests performed after Christmas but a mass surge in positives.
OK. So my next hypothesis would be that a lot of the pre-Christmas tests would be precautionary, people wanting a negative before going to see relatives on Xmas Day, whereas only those with symptoms bothered to rush out for a test straight after the holidays.
I think we are in the middle of big Christmas Effect, which will only unwind by about Wednesday next week.
Wales will start reporting cases again etc.
I think the spike in cases & positives on the 29th relates to it being the first working day after Christmas (see Monday Effect).
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
Is “Teachers’ Union Boss doesn’t like Education Secretary” really ever news?
This is worse. To take the teaching analogy;
The very best Ed Secs, like the very best teachers, are both ruthlessly efficient and able to exude bonhomie. You can get away with almost anything them. Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson, say.
You can do pretty well in both fields without the bonhomie as long as you are ruthlessly efficient. Michael Gove or Ed Balls.
You can also just about do OK without the ruthless efficiency as long as you can get enough goodwill. Estelle Morris, for example.
When you are both despised for being rubbish at your job and hated for being an awful person, you're stuffed. Which is where Gavster finds himself.
Surely there has to be a reshuffle now and he has to go. I think you can make a case for Priti but Williamson is just a very unfunny joke.
Would be good if he got no other job as a replacement, but Boris could always send him back to the whps if he must.
Only department he is any good for.
Given Supercovid I can't understand schools going back in January. Schools should go back ASAP but not Monday, but we should gear the entire nation for vaccinations for a few weeks.
Spot on Philip.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
When it’s much too late.
Why though? Are the whole cabinet really such idiots?
People will say "it's politics innit" but Johnson saying 'we're going to put the country on hold for a month or even two while we absolutely focus on mass vaccinations' would gain widespread support and would be a wise move politically imo.
Boris could unleash his "Spitfire Squads", vaccinating 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Aiming for a VC Day - Victory over Covid. Church bells will peal, huge street parties...oh, hang on....maybe not.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
Hmm. I'm in two minds on that. On the one, yes, that may be true, and a lot of what he does can also be done online. On the other, if it is part of his job as PM and it would be more effective to do it in person, why not? I don't buy the 'good example' argument, as most of us are not PMs.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
And the really frustrating thing is that there are ~20million doses of the AZN vaccine almost ready to go, a good fraction just needing a final check.
Slight caveat that "final check" i believe means sterility test which means let it sit there for 3 weeks to see if it grows mould - there is no way of accelerating that.
US Senate override of Trump's veto of defense bill
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep = Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1) not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
And the really frustrating thing is that there are ~20million doses of the AZN vaccine almost ready to go, a good fraction just needing a final check.
Slight caveat that "final check" i believe means sterility test which means let it sit there for 3 weeks to see if it grows mould - there is no way of accelerating that.
Where did you read details of that? I'm curious to know what the hold up is, especially as they have been manufacturing for a while already.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
Because the spread isn't mostly from them.
And I don't believe the vaccine has been tried and authorised on children.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
And the really frustrating thing is that there are ~20million doses of the AZN vaccine almost ready to go, a good fraction just needing a final check.
Slight caveat that "final check" i believe means sterility test which means let it sit there for 3 weeks to see if it grows mould - there is no way of accelerating that.
Where did you read details of that? I'm curious to know what the hold up is, especially as they have been manufacturing for a while already.
Are people so completely incapable of behaving themselves, that we are going to end up with evening curfews and police on the streets arresting anyone who leaves their home?
No, because we can already see the pathetic supine reaction of our police to the nascent manslaughter caused by these superspreader gatherings in public areas. It's almost as though they are endorsing them by their inaction. And the idiots know that and are encouraged to go further.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
You don't get it.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
Scary. Does anyone know why the 'positive swabs' figure is escalating rapidly but the confirmed cases is broadly level over the last few days?
I imagine you run a second (different?) test before converting a positive swab into a confirmed case, and that process may have been interrupted by Christmas.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
An analysis of COVID-19 data from 41 countries has identified 3 measures that each substantially cut viral transmission: school and university closures, restricting gatherings to no more than 10 people and shutting businesses. But adding stay-at-home orders to those actions brought only marginal benefit.
Jan Brauner at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues modelled the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in 41 countries between 22 January and either 30 May or the first easing of restrictions. The team also examined when each country implemented seven common anti-transmission measures.
By combining the two data sets, the researchers found that closing schools and universities had a “large effect” in dampening viral spread. Most countries closed schools and universities in quick succession, making it impossible for the team to disentangle the effects of each type of closure.
In countries that closed schools and businesses and restricted gatherings, a stay-at-home order did little more to reduce transmission, the authors found.
Assuming the stocks of Astrazeneca are there, could every test (that is administered by a third party, not a home kit) just come with a first injection? That would target the most at risk presumably. Test and immunise.
Is “Teachers’ Union Boss doesn’t like Education Secretary” really ever news?
This is worse. To take the teaching analogy;
The very best Ed Secs, like the very best teachers, are both ruthlessly efficient and able to exude bonhomie. You can get away with almost anything them. Ken Clarke or Alan Johnson, say.
You can do pretty well in both fields without the bonhomie as long as you are ruthlessly efficient. Michael Gove or Ed Balls.
You can also just about do OK without the ruthless efficiency as long as you can get enough goodwill. Estelle Morris, for example.
When you are both despised for being rubbish at your job and hated for being an awful person, you're stuffed. Which is where Gavster finds himself.
Surely there has to be a reshuffle now and he has to go. I think you can make a case for Priti but Williamson is just a very unfunny joke.
Would be good if he got no other job as a replacement, but Boris could always send him back to the whps if he must.
Only department he is any good for.
Given Supercovid I can't understand schools going back in January. Schools should go back ASAP but not Monday, but we should gear the entire nation for vaccinations for a few weeks.
Spot on Philip.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
When it’s much too late.
Why though? Are the whole cabinet really such idiots?
People will say "it's politics innit" but Johnson doing a crisis broadcast* to the country to say: 'we're going to put the country on hold for a month or even two while we absolutely focus on mass vaccinations' would gain widespread support and would be a wise move politically imo.
(*Minus the smirk and any attempts at schoolboy humour, please Boris.)
".. and it will be all back to normal by Easter" he'll tack on to completely ruin and undermine the message
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
There are countless examples on any number of subjects where information is provided and promoted, but people will ignore it. Pretending that there is not information provided or promoted when it has been is a very common tactic of obfuscators and conspiracists everywhere.
Do you think, for example, that Piers Corbyn has not been sent information debunking many of the things he has said over the last few years? How many times has it been explained that there is no proof of 5G causing health issues?
Simply saying 'provide the information' is not the answer, and I'd suggest it is misleading as it presumes a lack of information even when it has existed and that provision corrects that, when there is conspiracy theorising even when there is information, so it demonstrably is not the case that provision does not solve the problem.
So no, 'shed light' is not the simple answer it appears. Some people will stand under the noon day sun and insist it is midnight. Fine, we don't want to patronise people, some things are complicated and some fears may be understandable even if not reasonable. But some people don't want to enlightened about things, any thing.
If your suggestion worked then there would be no anti-vaxxers at all for any disease.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
It has been - tons of times on the BBC website for example.
They chose information that supports their ideas - this is a standard piece of conspiracy theory behaviour. They "Want To Believe"
And yes, it is very similar to the self radicalisation spiral that violent extremists do.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
And the really frustrating thing is that there are ~20million doses of the AZN vaccine almost ready to go, a good fraction just needing a final check.
Slight caveat that "final check" i believe means sterility test which means let it sit there for 3 weeks to see if it grows mould - there is no way of accelerating that.
Where did you read details of that? I'm curious to know what the hold up is, especially as they have been manufacturing for a while already.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
As far as I know the vaccines have not been passed as safe or even tested on anyone under 18. I think it would be reasonable for parents to be wary of subjecting their children to a vaccine until this has been done. Better that the adults in close contact with those children get the vaccine as soon as possible.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
That's been done for other vaccines. Anti-vaxxers ignore it. They literally make up what ingredients are in the vaccine. Lie about the possible side effects.
Assuming the stocks of Astrazeneca are there, could every test (that is administered by a third party, not a home kit) just come with a first injection? That would target the most at risk presumably. Test and immunise.
In a sane world populated by sensible people, that could be a good idea.
However, in the real world it would lead to 100s of vaccines with a dodgy storage history being punted on eBay for a quick buck. Sadly.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
We are all constructing our own views of the world, you of yours, mine of mine, they or theirs. The truth is many sided, and none of us has a monopoly on it.
An analysis of COVID-19 data from 41 countries has identified 3 measures that each substantially cut viral transmission: school and university closures, restricting gatherings to no more than 10 people and shutting businesses. But adding stay-at-home orders to those actions brought only marginal benefit.
Jan Brauner at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues modelled the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in 41 countries between 22 January and either 30 May or the first easing of restrictions. The team also examined when each country implemented seven common anti-transmission measures.
By combining the two data sets, the researchers found that closing schools and universities had a “large effect” in dampening viral spread. Most countries closed schools and universities in quick succession, making it impossible for the team to disentangle the effects of each type of closure.
In countries that closed schools and businesses and restricted gatherings, a stay-at-home order did little more to reduce transmission, the authors found.
Ireland finds stack of new cases. Fastest rate of deterioration in EU.
So it may not be quite as it appears.
Not now, no. But that had been the pattern for months, and it seems likely it was because the DUP insisted on looser restrictions in Northern Ireland than the government in Dublin imposed.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
Isnt religion a conspiracy theory that meets most of those criteria?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
That's been done for other vaccines. Anti-vaxxers ignore it. They literally make up what ingredients are in the vaccine. Lie about the possible side effects.
It's why pretending this is a failure purely on the part of those providing the information is deeply unfair. Communication can always be improved, but putting it purely on that is taking away the responsibility from those who refuse to listen even when information is provided. Infantilising them, in fact, which is just as patronising by giving them no agency.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
We are all constructing our own views of the world, you of yours, mine of mine, they or theirs. The truth is many sided, and none of us has a monopoly on it.
I have a monopoly on the truth. But I will license it to you for a small, small fee.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In one sense, it would be cruel to take their comfort blanket. In another very real sense, though, they are killing people with this comfort blanket, which somewhat limits the compassion.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
We are all constructing our own views of the world, you of yours, mine of mine, they or theirs. The truth is many sided, and none of us has a monopoly on it.
But without getting all Platonic, surely there are some underlying facts that should lead all reasonable people to the same very general conclusion whatever our political, social or religious outlook. And no matter what our views, presenting and promoting false figures when the real ones are so easily available and verifiable does not seem to be simply a 'different world view'.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In one sense, it would be cruel to take their comfort blanket. In another very real sense, though, they are killing people with this comfort blanket, which somewhat limits the compassion.
I think you under estimate my cruelty.
I would take their blanket away, soak them in cold water and leave them in the Arctic night. Naked.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
I don't want to get into a detailed discussion about the specifics of conspiracy theories. However, I understand it's an established fact that immunisation campaigns in parts of the third world were used to lower the birth rate. It was also said here (I have no source) that a fake immunisation campaign was used to gather the DNA of the Bin Laden family? So a good start to avoiding conspiracy theories might be not to conspire! The truth shall set you free as somebody wise once said.
Trust in in Governments is gone, and in some ways that's bad, but in other ways to we want that deference back - the sort of attitude where the transport minister pushing through the Breaching Rail cuts was a shareholder in a road building company, and it was deemed ok?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
Isnt religion a conspiracy theory that meets most of those criteria?
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that most non-extremist religion is pretty harmless (nowadays). Malmesbury above points out that COVID denialism is similar to the self-radicalisation that extremists perform.
But I take the point that society *can* tolerate citizens who don't share the same reality as each other, as long as the points of difference in belief doesn't lead to harm.
I also take luckyguy's point that nobody has a monopoly on truth. That's why I don't think that policing what's posted online can really work as a defense against conspiracy theories. It doesn't take much to see how that could be abused. But while a clear truth can be difficult to determine, clear untruths can be quite apparent.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
That's been done for other vaccines. Anti-vaxxers ignore it. They literally make up what ingredients are in the vaccine. Lie about the possible side effects.
It's why pretending this is a failure purely on the part of those providing the information is deeply unfair. Communication can always be improved, but putting it purely on that is taking away the responsibility from those who refuse to listen even when information is provided. Infantilising them, in fact, which is just as patronising by giving them no agency.
There is a great Infinite Monkey Cage episode that talks about the science and data on conspiracy theorists, with a focus on anti-vaxers.
Basically, two take aways, there is a direct correlation between low IQ and willingness to believe in a conspiracy theory has been shown repeatedly in numerous studies.
Secondly, there is no point in attempting to change the mind of the conspiracy theorists, rather, put you efforts at the mainstream who have minor doubts. All studies on this show this to be the case.
From series 2 from memory if you want to dig out the podcast.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
Because the spread isn't mostly from them.
And I don't believe the vaccine has been tried and authorised on children.
Fair enough.
One of the theories circulating about the mutant virus is that its greater infectivity arises from being more easily caught and spread by school age children. Currently without much evidence.
The second wave of the ‘Spanish’ Flu had a different profile of age-susceptibility.
US Senate override of Trump's veto of defense bill
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep = Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1) not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
Senators not voting (Reps = 5, Dems = 1) Gardner (R-CO) Graham (R-SC) Jones (D-AL) Loeffler (R-GA) Perdue (R-GA) Sasse (R-NE)
Puzzling. Why did 5 Dems vote to support Trumps veto?
Believe they were holding out for $2k stimulus checks; note that most if not all are from progressive wing.
Conversely, the Republican nays are mostly ardent (at least in public) pro-Trumpsky (for example Cruz & Hawley) and/or small-l libertarians (Lee, Paul)
Personally find the no-shows the most interesting group. Loeffler & Perdue are campaigning for their political lives AND also eager to fence straddle on this IF they can get away with it (we'll soon know). Several others (Graham & Jones for example) are likely also marching across Georgia.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
That's been done for other vaccines. Anti-vaxxers ignore it. They literally make up what ingredients are in the vaccine. Lie about the possible side effects.
So firstly you tell people, then you agree to regular random chemical tests to ensure other ingredients aren't finding their way in. Where is the benefit in any opacity?
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
Herman Kahn talks about the following interesting phenomenon - a potential problem is so big that it requires the expenditure of billions, massive changes in society.
The response of many "sensible" people is to avoid the reality at all costs - the harder he pressed on an issue, the more insane the response.
He describes a meeting where a senior official in the Treasury Dept - a clever, thoughtful man - invented more and more wild and ridiculous accusations and invented "facts" to deal with what he, Khan was saying. After the meeting, others present partied the line - including "facts" that were demonstrably untrue.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
My sympathy. I had a conversation with my brother about one of his friends who is in the same position. My best advice was to try to plant just a seed of doubt and not make it a debate or contest. The change in position can only come from the person themselves, as they will reject it from anyone else. Just as they would reject anything that seems like a loss to them. So I suggested not making a big deal of it but just saying "I think someone's having you on, mate". Maybe they'll start to wonder?
Doesn't it also make you ask what false beliefs we ourselves hold? It does me.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
That's been done for other vaccines. Anti-vaxxers ignore it. They literally make up what ingredients are in the vaccine. Lie about the possible side effects.
So firstly you tell people, then you agree to regular random chemical tests to ensure other ingredients aren't finding their way in. Where is the benefit in any opacity?
There is no opacity - the ingredients are clearly listed.
No anti-vexer seems to bother with getting a dose of a vaccine and analysing it. Presumably because they realise that they would find nothing....
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
I find it a bit weird to read this comment when I've had so many arguments with you where you've insisted that climate scientists are all part of a conspiracy and global warming is a hoax.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I think the important thing is to change the channel of the radio signal to my fillings.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
In some cases, yes it may be a comfort blanket. In some cases it may be about self-regard ("I'm the only one who can see...") or just trying to fit in with people they look up to.
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
Isnt religion a conspiracy theory that meets most of those criteria?
That's an interesting point. I think the difference is that most non-extremist religion is pretty harmless (nowadays). Malmesbury above points out that COVID denialism is similar to the self-radicalisation that extremists perform.
But I take the point that society *can* tolerate citizens who don't share the same reality as each other, as long as the points of difference in belief doesn't lead to harm.
I also take luckyguy's point that nobody has a monopoly on truth. That's why I don't think that policing what's posted online can really work as a defense against conspiracy theories. It doesn't take much to see how that could be abused. But while a clear truth can be difficult to determine, clear untruths can be quite apparent.
--AS
Well the idea that everything in our complex and scary universe was created and is being influenced by some all powerful being who lays down detailed rules as to how we all should behave seems to me like the biggest conspiracy of all time.
It would be diverting the thread, but the suggestion that believing such stuff is “pretty harmless” is debateable.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
Spanish Flu - second wave worse than the first. Lessons from history.
I was thinking the same - the second wave then was far worse. Although wasn’t this due to the virus mutating into a form more likely to infect older people?
In just the last week the number of new UK infections has exceeded 1/4 million - yet the restrictions in place are lighter than those of last April. It is hard to see this lasting; surely more u-turns are incoming?
Imperial report on Cockney Covid say November lockdown restrictions aren't even enough against this.new variant.
It’s only going to take a few more days of case numbers continuing their upward trajectory, before there’s no choice but to go back to where we were in March - everyone go home and stay home. If I were in the UK, I’d be filling up the freezer this weekend.
Yes, I agree. Most of the country is now in a form of temporarily enhanced Tier 4 lockdown, with schools also shut and many absent from work over Christmas/New Year. If the growth in case numbers doesn't level off in the next couple of days, then Lord help us. The next few days case number figures look to be absolutely critical.
The only number that really matters now is the number of vaccinations. Nothing is going to stop this new variant from continuing to increase its spread except an ever increasing proportion of the population who are immune. Nothing is more important and every effort must be made to source and deliver vaccine as fast as possible.
It is frankly the only thing that matters, though it will take a couple of weeks for doses to become active immunity.
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
And in that 2 weeks roughly 15k will die. Every day counts.
If the spread is mostly by 10-14 year olds, one wonders why we don’t vaccinate all of them as a priority, to stop them taking it home to their families.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
I don't believe ANY data has been reported today by Public Health Wales. Last update was NYE.
I guess there are two possibilities
(i) Significant problems in the assembling & reporting of COVID testing & cases, something to which Public Health Wales is not unaccustomed,
(ii) St Mark has eradicated COVID from Wales.
Pre planned reporting break. Same happened on Christmas Day. The 26th then had the normal level of cases, and the catch-up happened on the 27th.
I must fess up that I didn't expect a full on second wave either, more that we would have a long bumpy tail through the autumn.
It does look like the original SAGE advice in March was accurate. The second wave would be considerably bigger than the first. It does look too that the high mortality rates forecast before the November lockdown weren’t far off either.
If we had closed the borders and no reseeded it with all those summer holidays bringing the Spanish variant we might have seen a bit of a bumpy winter rather than a clusterf##k.
Yes, the future is always subject to changing by our actions.
Either that or we are predestined to be idiots.
Look at total deaths in the four UK countries.
You can misdiagnose flu or pneumonia accidentally or deliberately as COVID. You can also if careless label deaths with COVID as deaths of COVID. Short of criminal conspiracy, you can't get total deaths wrong. For England they're not far off other 'bad winters' like ... er ... 2017-18.
I don't spend much time on PB now. Except for the 4-5 users who can see right through it, you seem happy to lap up any old rubbish from 10 Downing Street. Be sceptical of these incompetent bastards, many of them with obvious hidden agendas ... and that's just SAGE/NERVTAG.
Ask if the PCR tests were carried out with Ct=30 or 35-4. The latter range certainly 40 or 45 renders the results pretty worthless.
Ask why LF tests on university students showed a very low rate of infection, ~0.25%. Ask why the stranded lorry drivers in Kent were given a LF test, resulting in only 36 positives out of 15,500, again ~0.25%. Result = happiness, because most of them could leave immediately for France. Similarly in hospitals which have changed to mostly LF testing for staff and have seen a reduction in numbers 'off sick'.
We'll be in tiers 3-4 in summer unless enough people see what's going on. Anyone want some bets on that?
Why?
Seriously, why?
You are insisting that it’s all made up, all a conspiracy - and not just here, but in Germany. Sweden. France. Italy. Israel. India. Canada. The US. Australia. New Zealand. Taiwan. Japan. South Korea. Russia. Poland. Slovakia. The Czech Republic. Greece. Portugal. Spain. Austria. Norway. Argentina. Venezuala. World-wide.
But you’ve seen through it (with graphs that (checks) literally say the opposite of your point. With all the evidence piled up and up and up, it’s all made up, or irrelevant, or can be defined away.
At some point, surely even you have to start questioning your position.
Does the conspiracy have a name? The International Conspiracy of Irresistible Authoritarian Scientists, perhaps? It doesn’t roll off the tongue.
Could you tell us more about how it’s organised? It’s marvellously effective, given all the disparate governments it’s managed to bring under its sway. Is there an Inner Circle, or something? Do we know their long-term aims, or do they just like having people stay at home?
Let's face it, if our governments were half as competent as they would need to be to run a conspiracy like this we wouldn't be in this mess.
Conspiracy theorists rely on several basic assumptions. One is that governments are incredibly powerful and competent, beyond their wildest dreams (and yet publicly accessible data which 'proves' they are lying, is completely trustworthy and not suppressed).
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
I recall an experiment, where psychiatrists, using evidence and persuasion managed to convince a number of people that their persecution fantasies were... fantasises.
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Yes, this is something that worries me about the modern conspiracy theorists, so well-fueled by the internet. (They in turn fuel the covid deniers, in this instance, which then costs lives.) It's easy to mock or despise them. It's very easy to show their arguments to be nonsense. But the question is how to help them.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
I'm not sure patronising them is the way forward, nor is the suggestion to 'de-program' such people - is some form of camp required to facilitate this process?
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Don't be silly, I'm not suggesting camps. De-programming is the term used when people are helped to recover from cults. And COVID denialism, like antivax and 5G and so on, work like cults.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
To my great sadness one of my oldest and dearest friends - a man with a double 1st in physics and philosophy who has run his own companies and has, to date, been someone I consider one of the shrewdest and cleverest people I know - has turned into an covid anti-vaxxer. I have tried talking to him about it but I simply can't get through to him. It worries me greatly because he is the same age as me and so in one of the elevated risk categories and moreover has aged parents who I am also very close to and who really should be getting the vaccine as soon as possible.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
Herman Kahn talks about the following interesting phenomenon - a potential problem is so big that it requires the expenditure of billions, massive changes in society.
The response of many "sensible" people is to avoid the reality at all costs - the harder he pressed on an issue, the more insane the response.
He describes a meeting where a senior official in the Treasury Dept - a clever, thoughtful man - invented more and more wild and ridiculous accusations and invented "facts" to deal with what he, Khan was saying. After the meeting, others present partied the line - including "facts" that were demonstrably untrue.
That's the thing though. For many (most?) people, being part of the group is more important than objective truth, so they find ways to doubt or ignore the truth if necessary to keep their status. There is little that can be done to convince someone of the error of their ways when their social belonging depends on adherence to the party/social/religious line.
I did read that the best way to coax someone from a delusion is to befriend them and let them explain their point of view while gently probing inconsistencies as they arise. Try to give them as little to lose as possible while letting them discover for themselves the irrationality of their belief as they try to explain it. Let them do the talking and slowly convince themselves. I'm not saying it's easy though.
England has now overtaken Wales in the 7-day average of reported cases (using Wales 7-day average up to yesterday as they didn't report today). Cases also shooting up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, so Wales actually is the one bright spot at the moment with falling numbers.
Is that cos Drakeford is useless? Or where are we now?
More like the NHS in Wales is under such stress, the testing regime/reporting is breaking down.
It could also be because we were locked down a week before England as well.
That's what happens to a rolling average when the latter part is all zeros.
I specifically did not include today in Wales' rolling average.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_suicide
Has a certain modern ring to it if you replace Catholic with another religion.
The link he posted showed that deaths were way higher than the years he mentioned.
Another is that even when a conspiracy is causing massive amounts of damage or death, and would require the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people to be in on it, virtually everyone goes along with it and only a few brave whistleblowers reveal the truth, ignoring both the prevalence of human conscience, and just how much money would be needed, at least, to maintain conspiratorial silence. How much would you need to not blow the lid off this conspiracy?
The other key is ascribing unclear yet definitive motivation for the bad thing that is the subject of the conspiracy, and that motivation is so powerful it overrides any and all other political, economic or cultural factors at play in a country, continent or world.
That's all plausible, right?
And of course, anyone pointing out implausibility is just a mindless sheeple, so it can never be disproven.
They then cry about how they are being bullied or mocked.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-ireland-idUSKBN2962LV
Ireland finds stack of new cases. Fastest rate of deterioration in EU.
So it may not be quite as it appears.
Everywhere in the UK reported a huge spike in numbers on the 29th. Apart from Wales.
Given most of us on here can see this plain as day, when will HMG realise and act accordingly?
*Edit: including cereals, obvs.
"Question: On Overriding the Veto (Shall the Bill H.R. 6395 Pass, the Objections of the President of the United States to the Contrary Notwithstanding?"
Yea = 81 (Rep =
Nay = 13 (Rep = 7, Dem = 5, Ind =1)
not voting = 6 (Rep = 5, Dem = 1)
Senators voting NAY
Booker (D-NJ)
Braun (R-IN)
Cotton (R-AR)
Cruz (R-TX)
Hawley (R-MO)
Kennedy (R-LA)
Lee (R-UT)
Markey (D-MA)
Merkley (D-OR)
Paul (R-KY)
Sanders (I-VT)
Warren (D-MA)
Wyden (D-OR)
Senators not voting (Reps = 5, Dems = 1)
Gardner (R-CO)
Graham (R-SC)
Jones (D-AL)
Loeffler (R-GA)
Perdue (R-GA)
Sasse (R-NE)
And discovered that it made the patients conditions a whole lot worse.
It seems that conspiracy theories are an attempt to impose order on a random world.
If the CIA is really running the drug war & the war on terror and beaming radio messages to the fillings in your teeth, then defeat the CIA.
Simples. Drugs, terrorism and your teeth will all fall silent. If the CIA aren't running it all, then there is no way to stop it.
If COVID is a complex plot by a bunch of guys and gals attending an opera in Austria, all we need is one agent to take a picture of all of them. The plot collapses. No more lock downs. Pubs open. The world is awesome again.
If we have an out of control disease killing right and left - well, is there hope?
Tests on the 28th - 357,238
Tests on the 27th - 352,702
--Christmas and Boxing Day--
Test on the 24th - 463,123
Test on the 23rd - 509,507
Test on the 22nd - 453,903
So no. Considerably fewer tests performed after Christmas but a mass surge in positives.
But I think many don't want to be helped. And then what do you do?
This problem is going to get worse, so society is going to need to figure out what to do about it: how to de-program the conspiracy theorists. I don't currently see any good solutions.
--AS
People will say "it's politics innit" but Johnson doing a crisis broadcast* to the country to say: 'we're going to put the country on hold for a month or even two while we absolutely focus on mass vaccinations' would gain widespread support and would be a wise move politically imo.
(*Minus the smirk and any attempts at schoolboy humour, please Boris.)
If we have 20 million doses coming on stream within the month then we could vaccinate half the 40 million that need vaccinating in the coming weeks. Everything possible should be done to get it out and get the other 20 million sourced - then the further 40 million for second doses, then this is history.
JFDI. If Covid has needed a war effort then sourcing and rolling out the vaccine needs a total war effort.
Wales will start reporting cases again etc.
I think the spike in cases & positives on the 29th relates to it being the first working day after Christmas (see Monday Effect).
https://covid19.shanehastings.eu/api/swabs/
I hope someone in power reads @Philip_Thompson here.
The varying levels of COVID denial are a defence mechanism against a cruel world. If Margaret Thatcher/Putin/Boris Johnson/The Illuminati aren't making it all up, then things are random and horrible.
I don't think you can fix this. They are constructing a pattern to fit the world, a pattern that is a comfort blanket. Otherwise they are naked, in the cold, cold wind.
If only there were places where all such young people were used to gathering, to make the logistics easy.
Yet even if the police don't have the resources to do mass arrests, surely the budget could stretch to disposing of a few tear gas canisters?
Puzzling. Why did 5 Dems vote to support Trumps veto?
And I don't believe the vaccine has been tried and authorised on children.
No democratic country has the power to enforce that kind of obedience.
China can because potential protestors know that if they escalate, the government will escalate with them, until it gets to belt fed machine guns and tanks.
France demonstrates on a regular basis what happens when the riot police is sent it to start/end a street battle.
Further - I predict once this is over, a campaign to remove "the unjust fines on ordinary working people" - the 10K ones for holding parties....
Scary. Does anyone know why the 'positive swabs' figure is escalating rapidly but the confirmed cases is broadly level over the last few days?
But I think we *do* need to find a way to fix this, or at least alleviate it. Because it isn't just about COVID, it's also other vaccinations, election tampering, immigration, and who knows what next. The direction of travel is brutal. Society can surely tolerate a number of people who simply don't share reality with the rest of us, but not too many, and it already feels uncomfortably many.
--AS
5,573 positive tests yesterday - though not yet through the confirmation/de-duplication procedure. Equivalent to over 70k cases in the UK.
Positivity rate of 20.7% too. Gone very bad, very quickly.
The government have reacted much more quickly than the UK, taking restrictions from looser to stricter in much less time.
The solution is surely simply to shed light where it is needed. Explain what is in the vaccine. Explain how it works. Explain what the filler ingredients are. Explain how the safety of each dose is assured. How can we complain that disinformation thrives when INformation hasn't been widely promoted?
Jan Brauner at the University of Oxford, UK, and his colleagues modelled the number of new SARS-CoV-2 infections in 41 countries between 22 January and either 30 May or the first easing of restrictions. The team also examined when each country implemented seven common anti-transmission measures.
By combining the two data sets, the researchers found that closing schools and universities had a “large effect” in dampening viral spread. Most countries closed schools and universities in quick succession, making it impossible for the team to disentangle the effects of each type of closure.
In countries that closed schools and businesses and restricted gatherings, a stay-at-home order did little more to reduce transmission, the authors found.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/12/15/science.abd9338
Do you think, for example, that Piers Corbyn has not been sent information debunking many of the things he has said over the last few years? How many times has it been explained that there is no proof of 5G causing health issues?
Simply saying 'provide the information' is not the answer, and I'd suggest it is misleading as it presumes a lack of information even when it has existed and that provision corrects that, when there is conspiracy theorising even when there is information, so it demonstrably is not the case that provision does not solve the problem.
So no, 'shed light' is not the simple answer it appears. Some people will stand under the noon day sun and insist it is midnight. Fine, we don't want to patronise people, some things are complicated and some fears may be understandable even if not reasonable. But some people don't want to enlightened about things, any thing.
If your suggestion worked then there would be no anti-vaxxers at all for any disease.
They chose information that supports their ideas - this is a standard piece of conspiracy theory behaviour. They "Want To Believe"
And yes, it is very similar to the self radicalisation spiral that violent extremists do.
I used to think that your solution was the right one. But it failed to prevent antivax conspiracies, mobile phone mast conspiracies, all the crap the worried mothers feed each other with on facebook, certain strains of Trumpism, COVID fatality rate conspiracies, and so on. That's why I talk about helping such people: it isn't that they lack information, it's that something else lies behind their position. But I don't know how to do it. I do think social media is a particularly toxic ingredient, though.
--AS
However, in the real world it would lead to 100s of vaccines with a dodgy storage history being punted on eBay for a quick buck. Sadly.
I simply cannot get my head around the mentality of someone like this in spite of knowing him since we were at school together. I find it all very disturbing.
In another very real sense, though, they are killing people with this comfort blanket, which somewhat limits the compassion.
I would take their blanket away, soak them in cold water and leave them in the Arctic night. Naked.
Trust in in Governments is gone, and in some ways that's bad, but in other ways to we want that deference back - the sort of attitude where the transport minister pushing through the Breaching Rail cuts was a shareholder in a road building company, and it was deemed ok?
But I take the point that society *can* tolerate citizens who don't share the same reality as each other, as long as the points of difference in belief doesn't lead to harm.
I also take luckyguy's point that nobody has a monopoly on truth. That's why I don't think that policing what's posted online can really work as a defense against conspiracy theories. It doesn't take much to see how that could be abused. But while a clear truth can be difficult to determine, clear untruths can be quite apparent.
--AS
Basically, two take aways, there is a direct correlation between low IQ and willingness to believe in a conspiracy theory has been shown repeatedly in numerous studies.
Secondly, there is no point in attempting to change the mind of the conspiracy theorists, rather, put you efforts at the mainstream who have minor doubts. All studies on this show this to be the case.
From series 2 from memory if you want to dig out the podcast.
One of the theories circulating about the mutant virus is that its greater infectivity arises from being more easily caught and spread by school age children. Currently without much evidence.
The second wave of the ‘Spanish’ Flu had a different profile of age-susceptibility.
Conversely, the Republican nays are mostly ardent (at least in public) pro-Trumpsky (for example Cruz & Hawley) and/or small-l libertarians (Lee, Paul)
Personally find the no-shows the most interesting group. Loeffler & Perdue are campaigning for their political lives AND also eager to fence straddle on this IF they can get away with it (we'll soon know). Several others (Graham & Jones for example) are likely also marching across Georgia.
The response of many "sensible" people is to avoid the reality at all costs - the harder he pressed on an issue, the more insane the response.
He describes a meeting where a senior official in the Treasury Dept - a clever, thoughtful man - invented more and more wild and ridiculous accusations and invented "facts" to deal with what he, Khan was saying. After the meeting, others present partied the line - including "facts" that were demonstrably untrue.
Doesn't it also make you ask what false beliefs we ourselves hold? It does me.
--AS
No anti-vexer seems to bother with getting a dose of a vaccine and analysing it. Presumably because they realise that they would find nothing....
It would be diverting the thread, but the suggestion that believing such stuff is “pretty harmless” is debateable.
Talking about the studies that have taken place on why people believe them and how to deal with that.
Lots on anti-vaxxers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000dfqn
I did read that the best way to coax someone from a delusion is to befriend them and let them explain their point of view while gently probing inconsistencies as they arise. Try to give them as little to lose as possible while letting them discover for themselves the irrationality of their belief as they try to explain it. Let them do the talking and slowly convince themselves. I'm not saying it's easy though.