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The first Senate impeachment vote splits 55-45 suggesting that the required two thirds majority unli
The first Senate impeachment vote splits 55-45 suggesting that the required two thirds majority unlikely – politicalbetting.com
Just five GOP Senators joined Democrats in voting to go forward with the impeachment trial against Trump for his role stirring up a mob that attacked the Capitol.
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I see a lot of tough words on here from some people about penalising certain types of speech especially related to spreading untruths about vaccinations.
I'm not expressing a view on that, but I'd like to know what the difference is between being an antivaxxer and being a climate change denier. To me they seem directly equivalent, and when I think of it in those terms it points me towards having the same view on what should or shouldn't happen to those people.
Now that the danger has passed put Trump back on twitter, his ramblings might get the number as high as 6 or 7.
Nothing has been learnt.
Romney
Sasse
Collins
Murkowski
Shit, I'm running out of names I know who aren't (afaik)Trump sycophants,er, Mike Crapo (because he has a funny name, no other reason)
You pay £200 to worthy charity if there are export restrictions on any EU produced vaccine between now and the end of March.
Bet ?
Its a bet I'm happy to lose.
Such as it's prevalence, transmission and even very existence?
Also, not stating a view, but that too could be seen as equally harmful.
More so if it comes to saying hospitals are empty, it's a hoax and you therefore don't need to take any mitigation.
That is killing people.
I am what would be described as a Luke warmer. Clearly climate change is occurring, but I do not subscribe to the extreme predictions of doom. Am I a denier?
https://twitter.com/PoliticsForAlI/status/1354195378506244096?s=20
https://twitter.com/PickardJE/status/1354195642088873985?s=20
Basically
"got good genomic sequencing ability so you find variants" = hotel quarantine,
"not doing much/any sequencing, so we don't know" = "welcome to blighty!
Usual suspects then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Members
Cannot imagine Pence in place pulling a Lenthall.
However, for humans it would be as close to the present one as possible.
But I agree that the government has made serious mistakes, most notably not stopping international travel last March. Also the Christmas exemption was probably the wrong decision.
But I don't want to talk about my specific view, I want to know whether anybody agrees or disagrees that the two are directly comparable. Antivaxxing=climate change denial.
Ultimately, for antivaxxers (and I am not one of them, I am strongly pro-vaccines), there is a philosophical space that says the rights of the individual to chose whether or not to have a vaccine should outweigh the rights of society to impose vaccination, particularly where (for the very small percentage with fatal adverse effects) the costs are borne by the individual while the benefits accrue to society.
Likewise, many who accept that the data point to our need to change what we are doing with fossil fuels and other forms of polluting the earth, but who are sceptical of both excessive reliance on computer modeling and the shutting down of criticism of those models, are labeled as deniers. I fully accept that humans are causing damage to the Earth and we need to change what we are doing, but I strongly dislike the way the climate change community has gone about it, and have been called a denier just for that.
To me, the harm is caused when people spread falsehoods, not when they assert other values, or question consensus, or even are selfish.
But, that brings me to a question. Why is Kirsty Williams retiring? She could certainly hold Brecon & Radnorshire, whilst her successor may well not. Kirsty is only 49 -- the only LibDem in Government anywhere in the UK.
Maybe even she has given up waiting for the LibDem revival.
And somewhere in Hotel California, a hard-faced man is adding to his bank account, acting as a paid liar for Facebook
The ratio of "announced Chinese company investments" to "actually happened Chinese company investments" is at least five-to-one, and may be as high as ten-to-one.
The MO of these companies (Foxconn, Hon Hai, Huawei, Xiaomi) is usually to agree to something headline grabbing, then use it to try and get lots of good local press to sell smartphones (or whatever), and to try and persuade local politicians to put pressure on the US to reduce export restrictions, and then demand completely uneconomic subsidies that mean the plant never gets built.
If its a trial essentially with the countries we know we need it for most first and the others later then that's actually reasonable.
If the plan is to do this indefinitely . . . indefensible.
Sheffield City Council announced the 60-year agreement with the Sichuan Guodong construction firm in 2016.
It was hailed a "massive vote of confidence" for the city but will now not happen, a councillor has said.
However, the authority said it had "no regrets" because the deal had "put Sheffield on the map".
Altogether the council spent £40,000 on trips connected with the agreement.
When she signed the deal in July 2016 Julie Dore, leader of the Labour-run council, said Sheffield would see "benefits and achievements" for years and years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-48925175#:~:text=A council which signed a,Guodong construction firm in 2016.
So a majority but not the 2/3 majority required by the Constitution will vote to convict Trump, though as he is no longer POTUS it will just be symbolic anyway.
Who decides?
Which is why I am uncomfortable with some of the more vociferous calls for a crackdown.
My view?
We spent far too many years listening to and engaging with outre views on social media in the interests of "democratising" debate and "providing balance".
Rather than saying they are wrong, an idiot, and probably malicious.
And therefore allowed them to leak into the mainstream.
This encompasses a wide range of loony views from many political persuasions.
If someone believes something is true, but the consensus is it is false, then should the minority be censored? No.
Free speech is more important than the harm of falsehoods. Sorry it just is.
Doesn't mean people can't face consequences for spreading falsehoods - including getting sacked - but not criminal censure.
If you have a moral dislike of vaccines, or believe they are dangerous, that's fine. I disagree, but we are allowed to disagree.
But expressing a clear falsehood about vaccines on a public forum like Twitter (or in a prestigious paper), that is qualitatively different. Journalists, in particular, have a duty to get it right, and not rush to publish - even more so during a pandemic.
The German idiot crossed that line. OK, maybe arrest is a bit strong, but he should certainly be fired. And I hope AZ sue the scheiss out of him. He also REALLY needs to show us this "data" which still apparently exists, even though it now only SUGGESTS something that COULD happen in a POSSIBLE scenario, a version which completely contradicts what he wrote about two hours before in the paper
Note that the party of Thomas Jefferson (and Aaron Burr) was the Republican Party. Which ended up absorbing most of the remains of its early rival, the Federalist Party. Indeed, it was so successful that in James Madison was re-elected virtually unopposed in 1820 (the "Era of Good Feeling").
However, by 1824, the (first) Republican Party had split apart, with the largest fraction emerging as the Democratic Party under Andrew Jackson, challenged by the new Whig Party (named after the Whigs of England; note that NO American party with any hope of power every called itself Tory).
By the 1850s, a new American Party (aka "No Nothings") had arisen in opposition to mass immigration, esp. by Catholics, at the same time that slavery was smashing the Whigs and sundering the Democrats. The (second) Republican Party emerged from this (dare I say) melting pot, comprised of "Free Soil" Democrats, "Conscience" (as opposed to "Cotton") Whigs and No-Nothings. After the Civil War, the Democratic Party regrouped, dominated by Southern Whites and Northern urbanites & immigrants, but also with significant rural support in the North & West.
Because the media want to travel the world unrestricted and the government doesn't want to upset them.
Because holiday obsessives want to travel the world unrestricted and the government doesn't want to upset them.
Is it the truth to say "there is no published data showing how effective thisAZN vaccine is in the over 65's"? Or is it truth to say "there is no published evidence that the Pfizer vaccine is effective with a 12 week gap"?
A lot depends on how keen a person is on following the science, or how far they want to go in anticipating it. Extrapolating that hydroxychloroqine should be widely used, for example, on the basis of some lab work.
Of course, awaiting solid evidence has risks, but so too does acting on flimsy evidence. One of those risks is in the anticipation being wrong. That would be very damaging to the credibility of a vaccine programme.
So it comes down to philosophy. How much do we need to know in order to act? And that in turn comes down to attitude to risk. By the nature of this site, people here are risk takers who act on hunches, but is that a sound philosophy in other situations?
https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1354184556241367040?s=20
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVFlkEonxhs
The last serious scientist who was an anti-vaxxer was Alfred Russell Wallace, a hundred years ago.
The science underlying climate change is much more difficult and messy than the science underlying vaccination.
So, I personally don't agree with your equivalence of the two.
However, the journalist was at fault, not for what he said, but ***because he refused to release the data***. It is the latter part that is unforgiveable in science. He wanted us to take his claims on trust. Science does not work like that.
We now know there was no data.
And wash your mouth out! This is not the forum on which to critique St. Nick!
For schools to be closed but borders to be open is literally insane. If there were zero other restrictions and the question was borders open or closed and nothing else then fair enough. We're way past that point.
When my children are forbidden from going to school and getting a proper education then I couldn't give the furry crack of a rat's arse about someone's desire to soak in the sun for a week. You want sunshine, my children want to go to school - which is more important?
Here is an interesting article on this history of anti-vaccination movements in the US (and UK), told in the context of the NYC measles outbreak:
"The ethics of mandatory vaccination, meanwhile, are still a topic of debate—even among medical experts, says Colgrove. As he writes in his book, State of Immunity, the balance between public health authority and individual rights has always been a controversial part of America’s history with compulsory vaccination."
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-24/america-s-long-history-with-the-anti-vaxxers
As someone pointed out earlier, in this case it is like falsely shouting "fire!" in a crowded theatre. Whether illegal or not it is wrong and deserves opprobrium.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1354075804880285702?s=19
But imprisonment? That's another matter. That's what I replied to. Sending people to prison for having "wrong" opinions is not OK.
HOWEVER, note that both the US Senate and House (and also state legislative chambers) frequently have a series of different roll-calls on the same measure, or rather different aspects of the measure, in which there is MUCH apparently switching, dithering & even changing of minds, as lawmakers do the traditional legislative Dance of the Bumblebees, trying to appease various factions, leaders, pundits, supporters, voters.
"Well, maybe I voted against you here - but I votes with you there, and there."
Sounds pathetic but that's politics.
Part of the explanation for fluctuations in US Senate nay votes against confirming various Biden cabinet picks.
This is a generational f.you from the old to the young.
I am neither old, nor young & just so angry about the whole thing. 100,000 dead, probably 10s of 1000s more by the time this is all over & all the time we could have been like NZ, or Taiwan, or any one of a bunch of other nations that did what needed to be done in a thoughtful fashion & ended up with death rates 100x less than ours.
Just sack him. There HAS to be some price to pay. And add a dash of mockery (tho I see he is getting plenty of this on Twitter, anyway)
Tempers are high, my blood was boiling when I wrote my last comment about schools and borders.
Insiders at the time were worried that Donald Trump, the former US president, might put pressure on Merck to halt supplies to the UK. “What we didn’t expect was the EU might end up going down this path,” a former UK government official said
The state should not be in the business of deciding what is true and what is false.
AZN suing him and the paper and getting a major settlement would be reasonable but that is the offended party getting retribution not the state.
Australia doesn't have lorries coming and going with drivers on. Heck, they barely have that around their own country.
So, it's not strictly true to say that we could copy and paste the Australian model, because (simply) we have a lot more traffic and a lot more of our trade involves people crossing borders. (Coal being loaded into big bulk carriers in Queensland doesn't really count.)
Travel restrictions work. But their effectiveness depends on there being a big difference between the virus prevalence in your country and the ones around you.
There are 20,000 new CV19 cases a day in the UK. Obviously not every person with CV19 will get diagnosed, so a simply back of the envelope calculation would suggest there are around 600,000 people who have (and are contagious with CV19) in the UK right now.
If we import 1,000 cases of CV19 a week, that would be bad. But it would also pale in comparison to the 600,000 people already with CV19 in the UK. We want to avoid those 1,000 cases. But with so many people already infected in the UK, we're talking about a marginal impact on the likelihood of getting it.
Last summer, when there were just 5-700 new cases a day, and positivity rates were on the floor, that was the time when travel restrictions would have made a big difference.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have them (indeed, I've been a big advocate in the past), but they clearly are far more efficacious when you don't have close to a million people in the UK wandering around with Covid already.
If someone lies about vaccinations, you've almost always got the time to look into it before you have to do anything about it. If someone makes you think there's about to be a stampede, you don't really have much of an opportunity to work out whether there's really anything behind the panic.
Now we know about strains and original Covid != Kent Covid != Saffer Covid != Brazilian Covid != San Francisco Covid (?) . . . and no other major country on the planet is even monitoring strains like we are . . . then its a different story.
Strains are a gamechanger. Close the bloody border, let us deal with Cockney Covid - its too late we have that - but keep the other strains away. Deal with what we have and move on until the rest of the world catches up with us.
East Asia is a rule-obeying society, content to be closely surveilled, and many of the more advanced countries in the region - South Korea, Taiwan - had previous experience with SARS and were physically, technologically and psychologically much better prepared for a repeat.
New Zealand is a faraway archipelago with a sparse population hugely isolated from the rest of the world. and thus easy to quarantine. Australia is nearer but still, it is an empty huge island a long way from other massive populations with few access points.
Almost no European or American country matches these profiles, which is why nearly all are suffering badly (one exception is Norway). Even countries which did well in the first wave are now enduring big death tolls - eg Czechia, Slovenia.. .
Could the UK have done better? For sure. But we were never going to do as well as all that
The "it's flu, only the old, sick and obese die, and everyone else makes a full recovery, the hospitals are empty" are all untrue.
Because of squeamishness, and a reluctance to call out a lie for what it is, we allowed these views to fester and germinate.
The recent Newsnight report from the Covid ward would have been much more useful last March for example.
It should be easier to put the restrictions in when cases are high all over.
Are you on for my bet offer ?
Many of them have spent tens of millions on properties here precisely for times like these.
I have heard awful news of kids' mental health suffering, as well. Kids I have known for years. What a wretched time
Agree with the Home Sec (and HYFUD) on this (I think) as a straightforward one-way-or-the-other proposition.
BUT that's rarely the (whole) situation in politics.
https://youtu.be/3gdCH1XUIlE
For years I've wanted to visit their city, to go buy myself a bottle of Henderson's Relish, which I've heard is rather nice. Sadly, I've never made it there, because I don't know the way.
Now that Sheffield is "on the map", I feel confident of navigating there and acquiring said savoury condiment. No more will my fried pork and rice be bland and unappealing.
I'm reminded of JRM making up constitutional precedents as to why even though she won a vote of no confidence May should resign.
Conservative MPs aren't usually reticent about complaining about things.
Yet apart from PP none of them seem to want foreign travel restrictions.