At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
People forget too that China was also one of our WW1 allies, and that we handed over Tsingtao to the Japanese, rather than the Chinese at the wars end.
China was of course the 4th great power of WW2, but once again not represented at great power conferences, despite carrying the brunt of the war on Japan.
Western Imperialist attitudes to China did not end in the 19th Century.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
There's a good Stargate: SG-1 episode in which a peaceful, high tech alien civilisation becomes mankind's best friend, helps out in all kinds of ways. Only it turns out they're playing a long game and cutting down on our ability to procreate, so they can take over the planet without a fight.
2010
One of the best one off episodes, and other than 1969 the best of the few time travel ones they did.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners...
Not just Westerners. The Japanese incursions in the 30s, and the resistance under nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, were formative in building the modern Chinese nation.
Recent vaccination rates have been plummeting with combined numbers of 1st and 2nd jabs well below half the peak of a few months ago with a continuing downward trend. We're well past the point when the entire adult population has been eligible for at least the first jab and less than 80k came forward in the last two days. So it seems fairly obvious now that the government is scraping the barrel in its attempt to find people willing to come for their first jab and by definition the 2nd. Hence it's hard to see current measures ever delivering an adult population with more than about 85% coverage of 2nd jabs.
Those unvaccinated people will remain prime spreaders of the disease. Combined with school children and a residual infectivity amongst those who have had the 2nd jab, that remaining vulnerability will be enough to allow evolving highly infectious variants to spread. Let's just pray that in this virulence of 100,000 daily cases a future mutation doesn't erode the shield that vaccines are providing to the rest of us.
What is going to stop the virus now isn't social distancing which has already been effectively abandoned by the population, but getting vaccination rates up to a level that accelerates herd immunity before the virus has a chance to further mutate.
The Government missed a trick by its wholesale abandonment of measures to contain the virus. There is plenty more that could have instead been done, short of compulsion, to make the irresponsible minority face up to a real choice if they persist with their actions. The announcement that those with double jabs will no longer have to self isolate from August is welcome, but I doubt its effectiveness alone. It is a leap of unwarranted faith to assume that committed anti-vaxxers will even have the NHS app installed let alone turned on.
There are numerous sticks that could make life difficult for those who continue to refuse to be vaccinated, sufficiently so to start changing their behaviour and get double jab rates beyond 90%. Things like:
- Announcing now a long term policy that only the double jabbed will be able to avoid taking a Covid test and potentially isolating for 10 days on return from abroad. Why the wait?
- Only allowing football clubs to operate at full capacity if they bring in measures to deactivate new season tickets unless the holder has had 2 jabs by September for most people and say October for 18 year olds.
- From the new school year in September, continuing to send school children home in the case of a Covid outbreak unless all adults in their household have had double jabs.
- Allowing employers generally to discriminate in recruitment to require if they wish proof of double jabs before offering a job, so as to protect the rest of their staff.
etc, etc
Yes, there's a price for exercising a choice to fail to play by the rules, when that choice has implications for others.
Yes, absolutely. Don't make jabs mandatory but make anti-vaxxery a real fucking hassle. No travel, no fun, no job
This is the future of the nation, and the world, we cannot let humanity be jailed forever because some morons believe Bill Gates puts microchips in your nipple
Clearly, those with medical exemptions would be exempt
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
The current Chinese regime seeks to create unity by imposing a plastic, largely invented, version of Han culture on the whole country. The idea is to create truth-on-the-ground, so that there is no possibility of regional discontent.
Ultimately, the aim is to abolish a separate culture. Tibet will cease (and is a long way towards ceasing) to be anything other than a name. The Uighur will follow....
As long as the tree is in the "right" direction - culture, religion and language getting less each year - the Chinese government will probably not escalate their measures.
So genocide by amalgamation, like the White Australia Policy and the Stolen Generation?
I think the Chinese policy on Uighurs is utterly disgraceful, because of the reported maltreatment and forced reeducation. But I wouldn't call it genocide - that terms relates to an attempt to murder anyone who happens to belong to a particular race, and shouldn't be watered down to mean pushing people into adopting the practices of another population group. If we call that genocide we undermine how we talk about the Holocaust.
Or see - "Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
*sits back and opens a huge bag of popcorn at south of the wall antics*
Meanwhile north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines "The SNP have taken their eye off the ball and the virus is threatening to spiral out of control in Scotland" - this apparently being a threat to Scottish summer holidays abroad which if he hadn't noticed started the week before last.
How many countries abroad are people from Scotland allowed to go to?
Do they have vaccine passports yet?
You can download vaccine records or request by mail if you need them.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
I have Korean friends in Japan. Racism has always been a huge presence there.
The expansionist militarism was more of an aberration, as were the suicidal attacks on much stronger countries.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
The current Chinese regime seeks to create unity by imposing a plastic, largely invented, version of Han culture on the whole country. The idea is to create truth-on-the-ground, so that there is no possibility of regional discontent.
Ultimately, the aim is to abolish a separate culture. Tibet will cease (and is a long way towards ceasing) to be anything other than a name. The Uighur will follow....
As long as the tree is in the "right" direction - culture, religion and language getting less each year - the Chinese government will probably not escalate their measures.
So genocide by amalgamation, like the White Australia Policy and the Stolen Generation?
I think the Chinese policy on Uighurs is utterly disgraceful, because of the reported maltreatment and forced reeducation. But I wouldn't call it genocide - that terms relates to an attempt to murder anyone who happens to belong to a particular race, and shouldn't be watered down to mean pushing people into adopting the practices of another population group. If we call that genocide we undermine how we talk about the Holocaust.
Hmm
"Birthrates in Xinjiang fell by almost half in the two years after the Chinese government implemented policies to reduce the number of babies born to Uyghur and other Muslim minority families, new research has claimed.
"The figures show unprecedented declines which were more extreme than any global region at any time in the 71 years of UN fertility data collection, including during genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, according to the authors of the report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi)."
This is an attempt to destroy a race, and erase their culture. If it isn't technically "genocide" because they aren't actually gassing them, then we need a new word which sums up the full horror
But otherwise agreed, it is a genocide - and if it doesn't quite meet the UN Convention description, that's only because that was narrowly drawn at the insistence of the Soviets who conducted the earlier atrocities.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
Not quite.
Japanese racist exceptionalism is baked, deeply, into Japanese culture. At to militarism....
What happened was that this was boiled up with their own version of Fascism.
*sits back and opens a huge bag of popcorn at south of the wall antics*
Meanwhile north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines "The SNP have taken their eye off the ball and the virus is threatening to spiral out of control in Scotland" - this apparently being a threat to Scottish summer holidays abroad which if he hadn't noticed started the week before last.
I saw on the news that Raigmore hospital in Inverness is on Black alert, the highest level, with elective surgery cancelled.
Which makes my point. It is not lockdowns that create pressure on non covid services and waiting lists, it is pandemic cases themselves.
Its absolutely up here - we've even had a couple of cases in my village. Its the notion from Scottish Tories that unlike the "let it rip" policy south of the wall that the SNP have allowed the pox to "spiral out of control"...
Sturgeon though has bolloxed things in the last few months.
Did she put any restrictions on Scots travelling to and from India ?
After all she was keen on travel restrictions to Lancashire.
But not travel restrictions on football fans going to London.
She hasn't seemed to be on TV so much since Covid cases went up in Scotland
She has far more things to worry about , her husband is in hiding , all her cronies are leaving, her top aide on permanent leave , top civil servant going , Lord Advocate gone. They are getting out before the cases come to court. At some point the police will need to do something about the missing £600K. Reckoning is about 50% of membership have gone, people hacked off that she has no intention of doing anything about independence. All is not well at Murrell Towers.
Mr. Thompson, Teal'c asking about the war with Canada was a top moment from the series.
That and when he ended up with a front row seat to the Vagina Monologues.
Any Teal'c one was pretty good. When he's bitten by an alien bug on an abandoned planet with nothing but bugs, with the venom then slowly turning him into a larvael form for the bugs and he has to escape from NID and get help from kids with water pistols is one of my favourites.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
Lower excess death rate than the USA - the issue with not locking down applies even more to them than the UK and they also had a good vaccine rollout. UK Excess death rate 50% more than France and two and a half times Germany:
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
Not quite.
Japanese racist exceptionalism is baked, deeply, into Japanese culture. At to militarism....
What happened was that this was boiled up with their own version of Fascism.
One of the reasons Japan's vax rollout is slow is because their scientists demand that all jabs are thoroughly tested on Japanese people first, they don't rely on foreign medicine. Because the Japanese are just that tiny bit different
Pure exceptionalism, and racially so
I still love Japan however, great culture, great nation, great flaws
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
The current Chinese regime seeks to create unity by imposing a plastic, largely invented, version of Han culture on the whole country. The idea is to create truth-on-the-ground, so that there is no possibility of regional discontent.
Ultimately, the aim is to abolish a separate culture. Tibet will cease (and is a long way towards ceasing) to be anything other than a name. The Uighur will follow....
As long as the tree is in the "right" direction - culture, religion and language getting less each year - the Chinese government will probably not escalate their measures.
So genocide by amalgamation, like the White Australia Policy and the Stolen Generation?
I think the Chinese policy on Uighurs is utterly disgraceful, because of the reported maltreatment and forced reeducation. But I wouldn't call it genocide - that terms relates to an attempt to murder anyone who happens to belong to a particular race, and shouldn't be watered down to mean pushing people into adopting the practices of another population group. If we call that genocide we undermine how we talk about the Holocaust.
Hmm
"Birthrates in Xinjiang fell by almost half in the two years after the Chinese government implemented policies to reduce the number of babies born to Uyghur and other Muslim minority families, new research has claimed.
"The figures show unprecedented declines which were more extreme than any global region at any time in the 71 years of UN fertility data collection, including during genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, according to the authors of the report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (Aspi)."
This is an attempt to destroy a race, and erase their culture. If it isn't technically "genocide" because they aren't actually gassing them, then we need a new word which sums up the full horror
And the west still turns a blind eye so we can have cheap shit.
I was a China hawk long before it was fashionable, so I welcome the new Sino-scepticism on here.
But what’s your suggestion? End all trade with China?
Step 1 is to admit that: a) they are a threat that is actively fighting a Cold War with us b) that economic rapprochement has not only failed but played into their hands.
Next step would be the creation of a full throated anti China trade and military alliance. And as quickly as possible to diversify all strategic trade away from China. They need to be played at their own game. And by that I mean heavy state intervention to rebuild industrial and manufacturing capacity, to secure important inputs for a functioning modern economy, and to make it as difficult as possible for China to skim foreign currency from Western consumers. Id also be highly interventionist in stopping Chinese foreign acquisitions too.
Personally it scares me witless what would happen to the West’s society and economy if for example, they took Taiwan, given our dependence on that island for semi conductors. So you make Taiwan a firm red line, while also building up capacity elsewhere as a fallback. But this needs doing in all sorts of areas. Active state intervention to rebuild production capacity in the democratic nations.
I think a lot of people have this impression that China is able to make impossible cost savings in production with everything they touch. I’ve visited more Chinese production facilities than I care to remember. The best use stolen foreign technology and benefit from things like state subsidised energy, raw material inputs and working capital finance.
Most just rely on underpaid blokes in dungarees with no regard for their health and safety or to even bother paying them at all if they have a bad month or six.
You’d be surprised how even at the best run places, you walk in and think “bloody hell look at that inefficiency there where they’re just throwing bodies at the problem”. No better or worse than most Western production lines probably. Just that they cheat and our politicians are too glib and gullible to do anything about it.
Oh and the seemingly never ending monotony and soullessness of most of the country when you get away from the shiny bits. Even in distant Xinjiang, the CCP promotion of Han racial and cultural superiority gnawing away at what makes the place special and unique.
There seems to be a divide in human instinct that cuts across many aspects of life and which affects our attitudes towards Covid. I would label it organic vs interventionist and it infects arguments about farming practices, healthcare, raising children, economics and many other things. It may be associated with political beliefs but not in a linear way.
I remember chatting with a colleague when Covid began in February 2020. We were both on the surface similar types of person, both doing the same job, both somewhat extrovert, voted the same way in the referendum etc. But she was already stocked up and ready for lockdown. I was instinctively (too) relaxed. The herd immunity idea appealed, even if in my head I knew it was probably very damaging. "Let nature take its course".
In the workplace some people I know have 100 day plans, make lists, have a laser focus on the next goal. I have always been opportunistic, see how things pan out. Then when it comes to
This divide haunts us everywhere. Some other examples: is it good to let children try and fail and make their own mistakes, or do we need to protect them from themselves? is the answer to antibiotic resistance to develop better and novel antibiotics or scale down their use and allow the ecosystem to balance? In a financial crisis do you intervene heavily, with the big bazooka, or is there merit in allowing some creative destruction? Is a bit of dirt a day and not being overly hygienic in the house a good way to avoid allergies? And so on.
Its not really a left right thing and I don't even think it's an authoritarian vs libertarian thing although there may be some of that. I do think it's driving a lot of the visceral reaction to the 19th July, one way or the other.
Really interesting post. TimS might like to join our authors for leading articles?
Another aspect of this is that because it's about personal identity, people tend to get very worked up about it and contemptuous of the other type. I admire Tim's ability not to do that in his post.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
We would be much lower but we had very bad luck on variants: firstly the Kent one arising when cases were low here - apparently a fluke - then the Indian one coming here first apparently because of our huge Indian population.
And, whatever Hancock said, we screwed up with care homes.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
1 is wrong 2 is wrong 3 is temporarily right, but will be wrong again soon 4 is wrong
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
Even if one accepts TMay = slower vaccination campaign, she would still be well ahead of Boris on saving lives if she had done more to prevent wave 2.
Lockdowns save lives in 2 ways: 1) avoid risk of exceeding NHS capacity 2) delay infections until after vaccination (this is the big one).
NHS capacity has not been exceeded. Indeed it didn't even come close except in very localised pockets, hence the lack of use of the Nightingale Hospitals.
The second point is indeed the important one but the reality is we would have had the second wave under lockdown just as we are now having a third under lockdown. Would the second wave have been smaller? Maybe. But not if our vaccination program had been 3-4 months behind where it might have been under May.
I think that there are pluses and minuses to Boris's rather more cavalier approach to governance but I do not think that the evidence we would have done better under "roundhead" May is compelling, indeed, I think on balance we would probably have done worse overall.
Unfortunately our vaccination campaign made very little difference to 2nd wave. UK deaths peaked in mid-Jan when we had vaccinated about 5% with first doses.
Even if we'd followed a French/German/Italian vaccination pace - we would have had 20% vaccinated with first dose by mid-April.
Also earlier lockdown has a much bigger impact than you are imagining (I think).
For instance, imagine a situation where cases grow at 25% a week when open, or decline at 5% a week if in lockdown. If you lockdown in week 10, you end up with 82 cases total. If you lockdown in week 5 and then open back up in week 10 -> you get 48 cases total. And if you had locked down for the first 5 weeks, and then stayed open for 10 weeks, you'd end up with 36 cases.
You have the same number of cases in week 15 under all scenarios, but your total number of cases is vastly different.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners...
Not just Westerners. The Japanese incursions in the 30s, and the resistance under nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, were formative in building the modern Chinese nation.
Yes - I think this relates back to a similar point earlier: most nations have defined themselves out of resistance to or opposition to an actual or perceived oppressor. In the case of the English, England didn't exist until - and was built out of - the fight against Danish rule. Similarly, a unified Welsh nation did not exist until the English came along to define themselves against.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
1 is wrong 2 is wrong 3 is temporarily right, but will be wrong again soon 4 is wrong
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
1 is wrong 2 is wrong 3 is temporarily right, but will be wrong again soon 4 is wrong
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Probably. Certainly if it had been my decision we would have closed borders earlier and harder. Though my point earlier about unintended consequences: pandemics are so complex that you can rarely state with any confidence what the counterfactual would be. Look at Czechia for example: so successful at keeping the first wave out before getting hammered with the second.
On another note, why does the economist call us 'Britain' - rather than UK, or rather than consistituent nations?
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Stalin & Co were quite emphatic that what they were doing was, indeed, "organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete."
We have the evidence of the people who knew and worked with Mao, Stalin etc.
The violent bit came, when they found what they thought was opposition to their implementation. So round up and shoot the "Wreckers" etc....
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Lenin was, Mao was, Pol Pot was, Castro was. They all believed The Theory, they thought it would bring Marxist Utopia, as promised in the Book
In each case, within a few weeks or years, the Theory encountered stubborn reality - the crooked timber of human nature - and they were all forced to adapt, and they adapted by trying to hammer human beings so as to fit the system. They broke eggs to make omelettes
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Stalin & Co were quite emphatic that what they were doing was, indeed, "organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete."
We have the evidence of the people who knew and worked with Mao, Stalin etc.
The violent bit came, when they found what they thought was opposition to their implementation. So round up and shoot the "Wreckers" etc....
How many totalitarian dictatorships call themselves totalitarian dictatorships?
Do you accept that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic? If not, why not?
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
Yes, the UK and Israel test to an irrationally obsessive level. It's completely pointless and a waste of money but we're still incessantly testing people and making everyone do shit lateral flow tests. It's something that needs to be cut after July 19th.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
Basically, yes
Of serious countries, only Denmark and Austria have done more tests per million. We are third in the world (ignoring microstates - many of them anyway British territories like Bermuda or Gib)
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Now run that through the per-capita calculator. We live in a big country Roger. We're bound to have more things that most people. And also bear in mind that we are doing far, far more testing than most countries. So we find more positives. But our positivity rate is lower.
And actually, the biggest country in Europe for deaths is Russia. Which is, you know, even bigger than the UK. See my first point.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
Yes. Between double to triple the amount per capita than comparable nations.
Plus we sequence the positives unlike most nations. Hence why we'd done half the entire planets genetic sequencing.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Stalin & Co were quite emphatic that what they were doing was, indeed, "organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete."
We have the evidence of the people who knew and worked with Mao, Stalin etc.
The violent bit came, when they found what they thought was opposition to their implementation. So round up and shoot the "Wreckers" etc....
How many totalitarian dictatorships call themselves totalitarian dictatorships?
Do you accept that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic? If not, why not?
I remember seeing a video of Gaddafi's son give a speech to some conference. The first sentence was "The Libyan constitution is the most democratic in the world" or something similar and his audience erupted in laughter. De facto and de jure are two very different things.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
I think that only Austria, in Europe, does more. And both countries are testing massively above the rest of Europe - multiple times their rates.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
So you are in favour of organising the provision of everything around monopolies?
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
In quantity yes. If you go on to worldometer and highlight the tests per million there are a number of European countries who do more tests per million but they are all small. Denmark and Austria are the arguable exceptions, the others being Cyprus, Gibraltar, Luxembourg. We have done 219m tests. France has done 95m, Italy 72m, Germany 63m. Its hardly surprising that we have more positive results than they do.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
Depends. Britain's response to Covid can be summed up like Britain's response to many issues down the years: reasonable start, poor middle, great conclusion.
I have a lot of respect for Cummings but one thing I disagree with him on is criticising the PM for being like a trolley. Actually trolley like behaviour can be a very good thing as it gets you, eventually, to where you need to be. Try and abandon issues that fail, try and keep ones that work.
Sticking straight and narrow rigidly to one path may help more initially but in the long run means you miss out on the gains that weren't in your initial path and keep doing that which doesn't work.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
I can't find national figures but Berlin (4.3% of population) has a capacity of 4.7 million antigen tests a week, and press reports are complaining that there has been a massive drop in tests carried out to just 700000 last week in Berlin - because people no longer need a current test to do things like eat inside a restaurant etc (because the incidence rate is so low). But back of the envelope calculation suggests that even this much reduced testing is much *more* testing than in the UK. But the myth of the UK doing massively more tests than anyone else refuses to die no matter how often debunked.
Chris Whitty contradicting what he said at the presser.
Not half. Although probably we need the full exchange.
Whitty was adamant on Monday that getting the exit wave out of the way in summer was best plan. How does that square with hell for leather suppression (which implies total lockdown based on their previous thinking)?
To be honest, Delta looks so infectious that I think only the most severe lockdowns would control it. Minor measures look pointless.
Why have cases fallen off a cliff in India? There is no way a severe lockdown is possible there
Herd immunity against the delta variant perhaps ? I think the UK had perhaps achieved herd immunity against the alpha variant but with the single jab breakthrough and greater infectiousness of the delta the wall didn't hold. We don't have herd immunity against delta yet, it will be achieved via further vaccination (2nd jab catchup), nightclub (un & partially vaccinated 18-30) and school spread (5 - 17)
The following things have been observed in multiple countries, when COVID is allowed to spread
- it dies back, apparently by itself. - contrary to some early reports, antibody survey do not show that even a majority of people in the effected areas got it - after such waves, it takes a considerable time for another wave, despite people returning to normal(ish) behaviour quite rapidly
We had not achieved herd immunity against the alpha variant - what we had was an R below 1 with a combination of vaccines and the restrictions at the time.
The idea that a wave of Covid will die back by itself is defintely hard for people to comprehend. I think its human nature to think there to be a human controlled reason for something happening.
Yes, we're still quite medieval in our mentality. "If only we can cause ourselves enough hardship, if only we can sacrifice enough, then the plague will go away."
It's going to be very interesting to see future scientific study of the reaction to the pandemic. My feeling is a lot of the rise of variants, etc. Is due to lockdowns and distancing driving natural selection, much not so than past pandemics. There are scientists who believe we will see the same natural selection with vaccines (I think and very much hope this is wrong). Lockdowns also extended the duration of the pandemic relative to, say, 1918. Not saying any of this was wrong to do, just that there are a lot of trade offs that will be researched more in the future and hopefully understood better, and will make for interesting reading!
Spanish flu had 4 waves from early 1918 to late 1920...
That to me is 3 years and we have currently hit 16 months.
It's not over. And in parts of the world with little vaccination is a long long long way from being over
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Lenin was, Mao was, Pol Pot was, Castro was. They all believed The Theory, they thought it would bring Marxist Utopia, as promised in the Book
In each case, within a few weeks or years, the Theory encountered stubborn reality - the crooked timber of human nature - and they were all forced to adapt, and they adapted by trying to hammer human beings so as to fit the system. They broke eggs to make omelettes
Millions died, and still die
Weren't they all guilty of a drastic misunderstanding in that case? Surely Marxism proclaims that true communism can only emerge from a liberal, wealthy, fully industrialized capitalist society.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
So you are in favour of organising the provision of everything around monopolies?
Not necessarily. It's not competition that is necessarily harmful, but that the consequences that flew from it, for success and failure, are disproportionate.
I've probably become more anarchic in my thinking, but, again, this is a political term that's much misunderstood.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
Not quite.
Japanese racist exceptionalism is baked, deeply, into Japanese culture. At to militarism....
What happened was that this was boiled up with their own version of Fascism.
I don't think that exactly contradicts what @Foxy says; What's definitely true is that unlike Germany which deprogrammed their fascist ideology, Japan (or America, since they were in charge at the beginning) instead made it cuter, so there's a lot of weird 1930s racial pseudoscience still floating around and commonly accepted.
What I'm not so sure about is the history before that; This is quite a difficult area to figure out because cultural theories are so easy to cherry-pick so a resourceful person can prove anything.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
This article claims that while-you-wait pop-up tests in Germany have had a big effect in keeping cases and deaths down despite a relatively laggardly vaccine rollout. As these are lateral-flow tests, they don't appear in the statistics.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Why the Japanese changed sides is also fascinating. According to an Australian expert (at least, that was how he was introduced) at the River Kwai in Thailand post WWI the USA didn't want the British 'interfering' in North Pacific affairs.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
In quantity yes. If you go on to worldometer and highlight the tests per million there are a number of European countries who do more tests per million but they are all small. Denmark and Austria are the arguable exceptions, the others being Cyprus, Gibraltar, Luxembourg. We have done 219m tests. France has done 95m, Italy 72m, Germany 63m. Its hardly surprising that we have more positive results than they do.
Once again, you are comparing UK pcr plus antigen with just pcr (at least as far as Germany is concerned).
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
I cannot believe any sentient person in 2021 is still making this ridiculous, embarrassing arguments to excuse the total failure of communism every single fucking time it has been tried, without exception, again and again, across the world
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
What I've come to realise over the years is that, while I don't have any theistic beliefs, there are some things that I believe to be true and that shape my thinking and actions.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
Stalin & Co were quite emphatic that what they were doing was, indeed, "organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete."
We have the evidence of the people who knew and worked with Mao, Stalin etc.
The violent bit came, when they found what they thought was opposition to their implementation. So round up and shoot the "Wreckers" etc....
How many totalitarian dictatorships call themselves totalitarian dictatorships?
Do you accept that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic? If not, why not?
Stalin and Co tried to implement communism. When they hit problems, they resorted to violence.
Stalin genuinely believed in communism - we have the testimony of everyone around him.
The idea that a People's Democracy (aka a Communist Dictatorship) is more democratic than letting the Head Count vote for whoever is a long running sick joke. One that dates back to the Bolsheviks....
North Korea is trying to implement a variant of Fuckwit Communism bolted on to the religious veneration of a family of Emperors.
We aspire to be a one nation government, serving the whole of the UK. It is therefore right that our work from central government continues to reflect that.
Devolution to Cardiff, Holyrood or Stormont should not mean stripping those councils and communities of their direct relationships to the UK Government.
Another focus for my department over the course of this year will be re-establishing those bonds, seeing it’s mission as levelling-up Swansea as much as Southport or Southampton. I look forward to establishing these strong partnerships across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, including with your partner organisations in those nations.
MHCLG has seen itself for too long as an England only department. We are one United Kingdom and MHCLG should aspire to represent and support communities in all parts of the UK
*sits back and opens a huge bag of popcorn at south of the wall antics*
Meanwhile north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines "The SNP have taken their eye off the ball and the virus is threatening to spiral out of control in Scotland" - this apparently being a threat to Scottish summer holidays abroad which if he hadn't noticed started the week before last.
‘north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines’
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
It could be argued that cancelling the football games would have played a considerable part in improving matters.
Certainly not allowing crowds at them. Aren't the English being completely irresponsible on insisting playing more and more games whilst the Scottish team did the decent thing? 😉 I fear even tonight will not be enough for them.
Biggest jump in Scotland (+5.6% vs England +3.2%, Wales +3.1, NI +1.8%) and still lowest overall.
Vaccination levels between 14/06 and 20/06 were:
England 79.0% to 81.6% change on previous week +2.4 to +2.9% Wales 87.9% to 88.7% +1.3% to +0.9% Scotland 79.6% to 82.3% +2.8% to + 3.0% N Ireland 76.8% to 78.5% +1.6% to +1.9%
Which would suggest about 40% have acquired immunity in England but only about 15% in Scotland. Which helps explain why Scotland has been hit harder than England by Delta and why in London its only had a marginal effect despite the lower levels of vaccination.
Northern Ireland looks to have anti-bodies than vaccination and previous infection would suggest.
That's hugely encouraging - suggests we're probably comfortably over 90% now. Is there data on how many children have antibodies? My finger in the air estimate is about 20%.
I'm personally guessing 30-40%, but that's also wet finger in the air. (Based on the 16-24s with antibodies at the start of March, which was prior to most of them having any chance for a jab). Of course, some will have had antibody levels decay, but they will still have T-cell protection and can generate tailored antibodies quickly on exposure, so while they'd be infected, the viral load would be hopefully very low and far more likely to be asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic, and their rate of passing it one would be much curtailed.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
I can't find national figures but Berlin (4.3% of population) has a capacity of 4.7 million antigen tests a week, and press reports are complaining that there has been a massive drop in tests carried out to just 700000 last week in Berlin - because people no longer need a current test to do things like eat inside a restaurant etc (because the incidence rate is so low). But back of the envelope calculation suggests that even this much reduced testing is much *more* testing than in the UK. But the myth of the UK doing massively more tests than anyone else refuses to die no matter how often debunked.
Myth?
Why don't you try getting some national per capita data and comparing them? Because the data is out there.
Or if you're struggling to find Germany in amongst the other countries its mixed in with then try this head to head comparison.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Why the Japanese changed sides is also fascinating. According to an Australian expert (at least, that was how he was introduced) at the River Kwai in Thailand post WWI the USA didn't want the British 'interfering' in North Pacific affairs.
No, that's not what happened.
In the aftermath of WWI, the idea was to remove all the things that had caused WWI. Or rather, the things that people thought had caused WWI
So treaties on the limitation of armaments, and the ending of various military pacts.
The idea was that the UK/Japanese alliance could conceivably threaten the US in the Pacific. Without the alliance, no one power could really threaten the other, providing the naval treaties were held to.
The Japanese government was taken over, starting in the 20s, by ever more extreme and Fascist elements, who regarded anything other than more battleships than everyone else on the planet, plus conquering China plus plus as evil and weak.
The idea that the British and Americans had done the dirty on them was their version of the "stab in the back" myth. The reality was that japan thing to conquer China was a farcical idea. But reality wasn't their strong suit.
In fact, the naval treaties and arms limitation worked in Japans favour. They never had even a fraction of the industrial capability required to build the insane fleet the militarists wanted.
Once the treaties were ditched and the Americans started building ships at economic capacity (not even max'd out!) this was spelled out.
*sits back and opens a huge bag of popcorn at south of the wall antics*
Meanwhile north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines "The SNP have taken their eye off the ball and the virus is threatening to spiral out of control in Scotland" - this apparently being a threat to Scottish summer holidays abroad which if he hadn't noticed started the week before last.
‘north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines’
You seem to have settled in well 🙂
I quite liked Mr Simpson's colleague who complained about the fall in testing at Scottish schools over the period in question ...
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
Communism is about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" not democracy and that is what the Communist countries have all had, by defining themselves as the proletariat.
Because the reality is that democracy and communism are mutually incompatible because when people have the right to vote and choose for themselves they don't choose communism so the only way for communism to actually work is to do what Marx and Engels called for which is to take and keep power by force.
I've not been following the pandemic in any sort of detail. Just listening to the news and government spokespeople. While our vaccine program was purring like a Ferrari Europe's were limping along like a Lada Riva with a puncture. Tory poster's on here have been crowing about our ingenuity and delighting in our good fortune at being-dare I say it-BRITISH!
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases. 2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths. 3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases. 4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Roger, this is just total nonsense. 1. France and Russia have both had more cases 2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us. 3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else. 4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
Does the UK do *massively* more testing than *anyone* else?
I can't find national figures but Berlin (4.3% of population) has a capacity of 4.7 million antigen tests a week, and press reports are complaining that there has been a massive drop in tests carried out to just 700000 last week in Berlin - because people no longer need a current test to do things like eat inside a restaurant etc (because the incidence rate is so low). But back of the envelope calculation suggests that even this much reduced testing is much *more* testing than in the UK. But the myth of the UK doing massively more tests than anyone else refuses to die no matter how often debunked.
The key takeaway here is that German establishments have required a lateral flow test before entry, whereas their UK equivalents haven't in general. Which makes for a much more effective testing regime than one where tests are available but optional
There's a good Stargate: SG-1 episode in which a peaceful, high tech alien civilisation becomes mankind's best friend, helps out in all kinds of ways. Only it turns out they're playing a long game and cutting down on our ability to procreate, so they can take over the planet without a fight.
2010
One of the best one off episodes, and other than 1969 the best of the few time travel ones they did.
In a similar vein the Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’ Features supposedly benevolent aliens who had a book which our scientists worked out was titled ‘To Serve Man’. What wonderfully servile friends they will be. It was, of course, a cookbook.
Beautiful. I am a Labour supporter and Scottish to boot but this doesn't bother me at all. In fact, I might put up our England bunting for the game tonight.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
I have a horrible gnawing fear we'll all be saying "you have to admire Denmark" tomorrow morning.
Attacks on Roger upthread are somewhat pathetic. Challenging him on the basis that the whole of Russia is in Europe is a little silly.
Sillier still is to ignore his substantial point. Some of the UK Covid numbers are poor and almost certainly poorer than they needed to be.
We need to face up to that reality as well as the celebrating what went well. Who knows, we might learn something useful.
Even excluding Russia, he is still wrong. Roger is always very quick to through mud around when it comes to others, mocking their lack of intelligence.
Some of us have been very critical of the poor quality goverence, poor quality academic advice and poor quality media coverage throughout. The public inquiry will unfortunately get bogged down in politics and leading figures trying to pass blame, but the reality is a wide range of organizations have been absolutely piss poor.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
Communism is about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" not democracy and that is what the Communist countries have all had, by defining themselves as the proletariat.
Because the reality is that democracy and communism are mutually incompatible because when people have the right to vote and choose for themselves they don't choose communism so the only way for communism to actually work is to do what Marx and Engels called for which is to take and keep power by force.
...because given the choice - through democracy - while people like to have other people's stuff, they tend to be even keener to keep hold of their own stuff. Democratic communism is something of a contradiction in terms. Given democracy, people reject communism.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
My takeaway from Philip's figures is that East Europe has had a nightmare. They also have poor vaccination rates. The UK has had one of the worst death rates of the rest.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Excepe.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget wher
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Every now and then, you meet idiots who try and tell you that the Japanese atrocities in WWII were due to their "culture" and therefore somehow excusable. Such as mis-treating prisoners.
In the Russo-Japanese war and WWI, the Japanese military behaved extremely well, according to the various conventions. In fact their punctilious observance of the laws of war was considered a sign by many observers of their "civilised" status.
They treated German prisoners so well in WWI that a very large percentage opted to stay in Japan after the war was over.
So, if you meet such fools, tell them the above. Then introduce them to some Koreans and leave.....
Yes, the Japanese militarism and racism only really got going in the 1930s, an aberration rather than a cultural issue.
During the Russo-Japanese war, large numbers of Japanese soldiers surrendered during the course of the fighting. (That whole war was, incidentally, a very near-run thing. By the time the Russians sued for peace, the Japanese were convinced they could not sustain any more casualties nor the cost of the war). So, the high command deliberately adopted an ethic of cruelty towards the enemy, in order to make surrender impossible for their own men.
There seems to be a divide in human instinct that cuts across many aspects of life and which affects our attitudes towards Covid. I would label it organic vs interventionist and it infects arguments about farming practices, healthcare, raising children, economics and many other things. It may be associated with political beliefs but not in a linear way.
I remember chatting with a colleague when Covid began in February 2020. We were both on the surface similar types of person, both doing the same job, both somewhat extrovert, voted the same way in the referendum etc. But she was already stocked up and ready for lockdown. I was instinctively (too) relaxed. The herd immunity idea appealed, even if in my head I knew it was probably very damaging. "Let nature take its course".
In the workplace some people I know have 100 day plans, make lists, have a laser focus on the next goal. I have always been opportunistic, see how things pan out. Then when it comes to
This divide haunts us everywhere. Some other examples: is it good to let children try and fail and make their own mistakes, or do we need to protect them from themselves? is the answer to antibiotic resistance to develop better and novel antibiotics or scale down their use and allow the ecosystem to balance? In a financial crisis do you intervene heavily, with the big bazooka, or is there merit in allowing some creative destruction? Is a bit of dirt a day and not being overly hygienic in the house a good way to avoid allergies? And so on.
Its not really a left right thing and I don't even think it's an authoritarian vs libertarian thing although there may be some of that. I do think it's driving a lot of the visceral reaction to the 19th July, one way or the other.
Really interesting post. TimS might like to join our authors for leading articles?
Another aspect of this is that because it's about personal identity, people tend to get very worked up about it and contemptuous of the other type. I admire Tim's ability not to do that in his post.
Thanks, that's very kind. One day I wouldn't mind writing a header. What I should probably be doing right now is getting back to my work!
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
Not wanting to do a Godwin but there are alarming parallels between the modern Chinese regime and the Nazi fascists. It doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that China will seek a 'final solution' for the Uighur and other 'trouble makers'.
Though there's little new there, communism has always been as bad as fascism though we tend to pay less attention to the worst excesses of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot. It wouldn't surprise me if years from now Xi is added to that list too.
How people in this day and age can self-identify as communists and not immediately be treated with the same contempt as fascists is beyond me. Two sides of the same authoritarian coin.
If, say, Jeremy Corbyn were to state that he was not anti-Semitic, do you simply accept his words? Quite rightly you do not. You look at his actions and you compare them to your definition of anti-Semitism and you make your judgement.
When I look at the regimes of Stalin, Mao, Castro, etc, and I look at the definition of Communism, do I accept their claims to be leaders of Communist countries? No I do not. There is no meaningful way in which China can be described as Communist, except self-ID. But then you'd also have to accept North Korea as democratic.
Well that's just ridiculous. These are communist countries. Xi maybe not, but the rest were.
Communism requires central control and central control leads to abuses like this. It is most definitely cause and effect.
There is no "good" form of communism.
Communism is about having local democratic control of the economy, as opposed to the economic dictatorship of capitalist owners. It is more democracy.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
Communism is about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" not democracy and that is what the Communist countries have all had, by defining themselves as the proletariat.
Because the reality is that democracy and communism are mutually incompatible because when people have the right to vote and choose for themselves they don't choose communism so the only way for communism to actually work is to do what Marx and Engels called for which is to take and keep power by force.
Marx thought that some societies, Britain in particular, could bring about communism by wholly democratic and parliamentary means.
There's a good Stargate: SG-1 episode in which a peaceful, high tech alien civilisation becomes mankind's best friend, helps out in all kinds of ways. Only it turns out they're playing a long game and cutting down on our ability to procreate, so they can take over the planet without a fight.
2010
One of the best one off episodes, and other than 1969 the best of the few time travel ones they did.
In a similar vein the Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’ Features supposedly benevolent aliens who had a book which our scientists worked out was titled ‘To Serve Man’. What wonderfully servile friends they will be. It was, of course, a cookbook.
In another similar vein the original Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors "Hungry are the Damned" which was based on that episode of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
I have a horrible gnawing fear we'll all be saying "you have to admire Denmark" tomorrow morning.
I've got a bunch of requests for Monday off which I'm not approving. I mean these people are determined to jinx it.
To be fair on Keir (and I rarely am!) he has a long and well documented history of being a football fan and player, including attending England games, well before being an MP.
I think I've spotted the fatal flaw in the government's approach: the idea that it's best to have this wave in summer, when transmission is reduced by people being outside.
Down here on the south coast the weather is awful. My wife has just got out her winter clothes. Few people are venturing out, and the beer gardens are empty. It's been like this for most of the "summer". Miserable: the opposite of last year.
*typing in my Majorcan garden*
Actually, last summer was pretty mediocre. Your memories are probably coloured by the extraordinarily dry, warm and sunny spell in spring, which continued into June. But then stopped.
This does look like quite a traditional shit British summer, however. I doubt if we will hit 30C again now
Except that June, despite the rain, was the fourth warmest on record.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Why the Japanese changed sides is also fascinating. According to an Australian expert (at least, that was how he was introduced) at the River Kwai in Thailand post WWI the USA didn't want the British 'interfering' in North Pacific affairs.
No, that's not what happened.
In the aftermath of WWI, the idea was to remove all the things that had caused WWI. Or rather, the things that people thought had caused WWI
So treaties on the limitation of armaments, and the ending of various military pacts.
The idea was that the UK/Japanese alliance could conceivably threaten the US in the Pacific. Without the alliance, no one power could really threaten the other, providing the naval treaties were held to.
The Japanese government was taken over, starting in the 20s, by ever more extreme and Fascist elements, who regarded anything other than more battleships than everyone else on the planet, plus conquering China plus plus as evil and weak.
The idea that the British and Americans had done the dirty on them was their version of the "stab in the back" myth. The reality was that japan thing to conquer China was a farcical idea. But reality wasn't their strong suit.
In fact, the naval treaties and arms limitation worked in Japans favour. They never had even a fraction of the industrial capability required to build the insane fleet the militarists wanted.
Once the treaties were ditched and the Americans started building ships at economic capacity (not even max'd out!) this was spelled out.
Thanks for that. One of these days I'm going to have a read round the subject. I was on a train trip from Bangkok to Singapore and one of the 'attractions' was a stop at Kanchanaburi, a trip on the river, and a lecture, as I said, from someone whom we were told was an Australian academic working with the Museum.
Who is the woman in the first who has only eyes for Sir Keir? I also thought, at first glance, that the light fitting was actually a massive glass of beer that Sir Keir was hoisting aloft!
There's a good Stargate: SG-1 episode in which a peaceful, high tech alien civilisation becomes mankind's best friend, helps out in all kinds of ways. Only it turns out they're playing a long game and cutting down on our ability to procreate, so they can take over the planet without a fight.
2010
One of the best one off episodes, and other than 1969 the best of the few time travel ones they did.
In a similar vein the Twilight Zone episode ‘To Serve Man’ Features supposedly benevolent aliens who had a book which our scientists worked out was titled ‘To Serve Man’. What wonderfully servile friends they will be. It was, of course, a cookbook.
In another similar vein the original Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors "Hungry are the Damned" which was based on that episode of course. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxI7B758XBQ
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
I have a horrible gnawing fear we'll all be saying "you have to admire Denmark" tomorrow morning.
I've got a bunch of requests for Monday off which I'm not approving. I mean these people are determined to jinx it.
Are they asking for time off to get over the disappointment of losing to Italy?
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
My takeaway from Philip's figures is that East Europe has had a nightmare. They also have poor vaccination rates. The UK has had one of the worst death rates of the rest.
About a year ago, everyone was talking about how great the Eastern European countries were doing and bemoaning how much worse run the UK was than them. Then they got hit badly by the second wave and suddenly everyone shut up about them. Moral: stop making up narratives purely to fit the facts if you don't really understand the mechanics of why some countries have done better than others. It's complicated, and lots of the factors (% diabetics, age profile, % immunocompromised etc) were out of politician's control.
Long Covid is interesting. I remember some thirty-odd years ago trying to juggle a five-a-side team match at our drug company (I organised it only to ensure I was picked. I was never any good). As we were down to the bare bones, I rang someone who'd been off sick some weeks earlier but was now back.
"Sorry," he said. "I hope to play again soon, but you know what viruses can be like, they can drag on a bit."
They do sometimes, don't they?
People have forgotten about convalescence and seem to think it’s a binary choice - ill or not ill. Viruses can take time to get over but “Long COVID” seems to be used primarily as a means of justifying whatever opinion you had anyway.
Long Covid is a catch all term which covers a (probably considerable) number of conditions. It will be some time before the medics have fully categorised it.
If it is how they treat other post-viral fatigue symptoms then they'll just ignore it and pretend it doesn't exists and if they do pay attention they'll say that it is all in the suffer's head.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
I have a horrible gnawing fear we'll all be saying "you have to admire Denmark" tomorrow morning.
At the risk of sounding a bit Sheldon Cooperish, Professor Reicher is a psychologist. Why is he sounding off about long Covid? Mission-creep seems an occupational hazard for some experts in other fields.
I can see the scene now ... "Let me through, I've a degree in Expressive Dance.
Yes, we are well used to the media using rent-a-gob backbenchers as a way of apparently giving an insight into Govt policy. It is a very bad development of this pandemic that the media make no attempt to consider an individual’s area of expertise in their rent-a-hobby-scientist approach throughout the pandemic. Simply having an association with an “expert” committee (whether official or unofficial” is deemed sufficient.
It's a general fact of life that a backbencher only gets serious airtime if they're arguing with their party leadership. I took on Mandelson's Millennium Dome in the early days and the media were absolutely all over me - a dozen calls a day. At some point the Government compromised on how it would be funded (I forget the details) and I said that seemed more reasonable. Media enquiries stopped immediately.
LOL. If only our current MPs had such self awareness. Instead there is a group who seem deluded into thinking that what they think actually matters and become addicted to the TV interviews as a way of feeding their massive egos. They become a permanent awkward squad to make sure that they get the attention that they so obviously deserve, apparently oblivious to the fact that they are simply being used to cause controversy and problems for the government they purport to support.
Mrs May is showing alarming tendencies in this direction and she really should know better.
I doubt she loses much sleep over showing insufficient loyalty to friend Boris, what with all the 'controversy and problems' he caused her government, which he purported to support.
If TMay had still been PM far fewer would have died.
You think? Would she have been bold enough to give a blank cheque to the Covid vaccine group under Kate Bingham? Would she even have had the balls to appoint Bingham in the first place? I seriously doubt it.
I also think that the current mess in Scotland demonstrates once again that more lockdowns both in time and extent simply aren't the answer. They may defer some deaths, they don't prevent them.
The vaccine rollout in the UK is a relative success, compared with peer countries, which nevertheless have had mostly a much lower death rate from Covid. The reason for the very high death rate in England in particular isn't hard to find: the unwillingness of the Johnson government to lock down quickly or effectively enough. Would May have dithered in the same catastrophic way? Don't know obviously, but suspect not.
Except its not true. If you look at excess death figures which are the only honest figures, the UK has a lower death rate than even the USA for instance despite the UK being a much more densely packed nation than the naturally socially distanced America - and population density is strongly correlated with death rates.
The USA is a poor comparison, for many of the reasons you actually cite.
What about comparing U.K. with its near, and similarly dense, neighbours?
Bulgaria 433 Russia 338 Serbia 320 Lithuania 319 North Macedonia 319 Czech Republic 300 Slovakia 270 Poland 264 Bosnia and Herzegovnia 245 Romania 236 Moldova 231 Hungary 228 Albania 206 Portugal 203 Kosovo 200 Italy 197 Slovenia 185 Britain 180 Croatia 176 Spain 170 Belgium 165 Montenegro 154 Latvia 134 Ukraine 133 Georgia 129 Kyrgyzstan 128 France 126 Estonia 124 Netherlands 117 Switzerland 108 Austria 105 Sweden 102 Germany 63 Malta 51 Luxembourg 50 Greece 38 Finland 18 Denmark -1
So the UK is about middle of the pack, despite being on of the densest nations on the planet. Which means in my opinion the UK has done better than you'd expect all else being equal. Certainly without cherry picking exceptions like Germany, it seems the UK has not done worse or led to a "very high" death rate.
Certainly there's no reason we couldn't have been towards the top of that list with a death rate roughly twice what we have got if we really had done "catastrophically" and without vaccines I imagine that would have been very plausible.
But we had more warning, and we are an island. We had advantages we did not exploit. We should be nearer the bottom of that table
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
Not just that. Look at the countries that have done worse than the UK. It's a long list, sure, but "better than Bulgaria and Bosnia" isn't saying much. If you take Western European countries as your comparator, the UK has done about 10% better than Italy and Portugal, slightly worse than Spain. And, with great affection for Spain, Spain is not well run.
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
The UK is not well run either, I think the last year and a half has made that extremely obvious. Anyone trying to say otherwise should have their head examined.
That’s the bloody point.
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
And you have to admire Denmark. I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
I have a horrible gnawing fear we'll all be saying "you have to admire Denmark" tomorrow morning.
I've got a bunch of requests for Monday off which I'm not approving. I mean these people are determined to jinx it.
Are they asking for time off to get over the disappointment of losing to Italy?
FFS – we aren't even in the final yet. Stop with this stuff.
*sits back and opens a huge bag of popcorn at south of the wall antics*
Meanwhile north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines "The SNP have taken their eye off the ball and the virus is threatening to spiral out of control in Scotland" - this apparently being a threat to Scottish summer holidays abroad which if he hadn't noticed started the week before last.
‘north of the wall, the Tory nob cheese Transport spokesman Graham Simpson whines’
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
The tables have turned since the 19th century. We now allow China to buy up and modernise our infrastructure, and are reliant on Chinese capital and investment.
My issue with China, apart from the way it treats its own people, is that it advances the authoritarian, anti-democratic surveillance state as a model of development.
Ultimately, that’s a threat to our way of life, or perhaps our children’s way of life.
One of the best things Britain can do, in my opinion, is better uphold democracy, liberty and the rule of law in *this* country, thereby acting as an example to others.
We did this quite well for a hundred years or so.
Fun fact, I was taught by someone later outed as a Chinese spy at University.
Fat chance when we've got Sunak wanting a more "nuanced" relationship with China, "nuanced" meaning "we promise we won't ever criticise you".
We do have to live with China somehow. We can’t wish it away. Therefore, I’m reserving judgment on Sunak’s comments.
I don’t even especially think it necessary for the govt to “criticise” China, but I do want it to promote our values, and protect our strategic industries and technologies.
There is a difference between living with a country and bending over and holding our ankles.
Making pacts with the devil is never a good idea. And yes I do believe China under the current regime is a devil. It is a threat to freedom and liberty and democracy. The more we depend on it, the more that will threaten our freedom, liberty and democracy.
Except that the move is now (albeit slight so far) away from dependence. The recent sharp spike in transport costs, and the massive delays in getting some types of goods out of China, have opened quite a few peoples eyes, irrespective of any human rights objections. Sunak and the government will be judged by their deeds rather than his words; I don't have any great confidence in them either, but we'll see.
I hope so.
Not content with persecuting Uighurs in China, it is now going after Uighurs who have managed to escape abroad.
China is IMO an evil regime and we should sup with them with a very long spoon indeed, if we have to sup with them at all.
I forget where I read it, but I found somewhere a suggestion ..... from someone who thought about these things ..... that today's Chinese leaders may describe themselves as Communists, but they are in fact in the long tradition of Emperors, and that they, perhaps subconsciously, believe that the Han are the superior group in humanity, and that everyone else should try to become Han, or to be made Han.
For their own good!
That's not saying that I disagree with Ms Cyclefree, that we should be very, very cautious in our dealing with the Chinese Government. I'm say that we ought to be very careful in our dealing with any Chinese Government, and that caution should take into account the fact that while the current Government may be Communist, it's still Chinese, and remembers the indignities heaped upon the country by 19th & early 20th Century Westerners.
And a somewhat belated Good Morning everyone!
Morning! Just reading a history of the siege of the German base in Tsingtao (as it was called then) by the Japanese in WW1. The Germans just rocked up in the 1890s and said 'we'll have our base here, thank you very much' - in the ensuing disputes, they paid serious attention only to the other Western (incl Russia) governments.
Which reminds me, the Japanese also were honorary Westerners. Which puts an interesting light, from the Chine3se point of view, on the current discussions in Japan over whether to deal with the Taiwan issue by allying with the USA.
Most people do forget - or never knew - that the Japanese were our allies in WW1. I have a fascinating account by a soldier of the machine gun corps crossing the Mediterranean from Marseille to Egypt in 1918 and their ship being protected by a couple of Japanese destroyers hunting for Austro-Hungarian submarines.
Why the Japanese changed sides is also fascinating. According to an Australian expert (at least, that was how he was introduced) at the River Kwai in Thailand post WWI the USA didn't want the British 'interfering' in North Pacific affairs.
No, that's not what happened.
In the aftermath of WWI, the idea was to remove all the things that had caused WWI. Or rather, the things that people thought had caused WWI
So treaties on the limitation of armaments, and the ending of various military pacts.
The idea was that the UK/Japanese alliance could conceivably threaten the US in the Pacific. Without the alliance, no one power could really threaten the other, providing the naval treaties were held to.
The Japanese government was taken over, starting in the 20s, by ever more extreme and Fascist elements, who regarded anything other than more battleships than everyone else on the planet, plus conquering China plus plus as evil and weak.
The idea that the British and Americans had done the dirty on them was their version of the "stab in the back" myth. The reality was that japan thing to conquer China was a farcical idea. But reality wasn't their strong suit.
In fact, the naval treaties and arms limitation worked in Japans favour. They never had even a fraction of the industrial capability required to build the insane fleet the militarists wanted.
Once the treaties were ditched and the Americans started building ships at economic capacity (not even max'd out!) this was spelled out.
Thanks for that. One of these days I'm going to have a read round the subject. I was on a train trip from Bangkok to Singapore and one of the 'attractions' was a stop at Kanchanaburi, a trip on the river, and a lecture, as I said, from someone whom we were told was an Australian academic working with the Museum.
The thing to understand is that, even by the standards of fascism, the Japanese militarists were demented fuckwits.
Read the Hagakure - a homage to the joy joy of The Samurai, written by a fanatic, long after the real Samurai age had ended. The Japanese fascists loved it.....
Beautiful failure is better than the wrong kind of success is the message. Oh, and long live death!
Read it and you can really understand Banzai charges......
Rare for me to say this but in this instance I think the Government are right. In answer to Mike's last question, for far too many people the time will never be right to lift restrictions and I personally think the Government have this one about right.
The problem with your thinking is it is too binary. They are on, they have to come off eventually.
The actual question is this one. Limit infections best, or limit infections unnecessary?
The scientists are saying limit infections is best route, so think less binary about restrictions.
Our genial host is spot on, the divergent from science is because of government over promising in first place, before getting there and having proper look around.
However scientists communication of what they mean by controlling through vaccination not herd immunity means in terms of practically achieving that, time frames, impact on business, and the sound virology behind it has been abysmal so far. But we need to listen to and understand this argument before saying scientists wrong, government right.
Comments
We fucked up on the borders, on that we can all agree
China was of course the 4th great power of WW2, but once again not represented at great power conferences, despite carrying the brunt of the war on Japan.
Western Imperialist attitudes to China did not end in the 19th Century.
The self-ID Communist countries all had much less democracy. Not more. Cannot then be Communist by any definition of Communism that I recognise.
One of the best one off episodes, and other than 1969 the best of the few time travel ones they did.
The Japanese incursions in the 30s, and the resistance under nationalist Chiang Kai-shek, were formative in building the modern Chinese nation.
(i'll get my coat)
That and when he ended up with a front row seat to the Vagina Monologues.
Or see -
"Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
Nearly all of them start off with the naive optimism of The Theory, they don't intend to end up as failed, impoverished dystopias. Read the early history of Lenin's Russia, Mao's China, Castro's Cuba, even Pol Pot's Cambodia
They honestly believed they were bringing *real* democracy and REAL equality, and yet they all ended up as appalling disaster-zones, some of them the worst regimes in human history
This IS communism. It keeps failing because failure is encoded in its DNA, because it is opposed to human nature, it treats humans as machines, it is a Godless promise of guaranteed misery
The expansionist militarism was more of an aberration, as were the suicidal attacks on much stronger countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_famine_of_1931–1933
But otherwise agreed, it is a genocide - and if it doesn't quite meet the UN Convention description, that's only because that was narrowly drawn at the insistence of the Soviets who conducted the earlier atrocities.
Japanese racist exceptionalism is baked, deeply, into Japanese culture. At to militarism....
What happened was that this was boiled up with their own version of Fascism.
And too much obese slobbery.
1. FIRST in Europe for total number of cases.
2. FIRST in Europe for total number of deaths.
3. FIRST in Europe for total of NEW cases.
4. FIRST in Europe for total number of NEW deaths.
Pure exceptionalism, and racially so
I still love Japan however, great culture, great nation, great flaws
a) they are a threat that is actively fighting a Cold War with us
b) that economic rapprochement has not only failed but played into their hands.
Next step would be the creation of a full throated anti China trade and military alliance. And as quickly as possible to diversify all strategic trade away from China. They need to be played at their own game. And by that I mean heavy state intervention to rebuild industrial and manufacturing capacity, to secure important inputs for a functioning modern economy, and to make it as difficult as possible for China to skim foreign currency from Western consumers. Id also be highly interventionist in stopping Chinese foreign acquisitions too.
Personally it scares me witless what would happen to the West’s society and economy if for example, they took Taiwan, given our dependence on that island for semi conductors. So you make Taiwan a firm red line, while also building up capacity elsewhere as a fallback. But this needs doing in all sorts of areas. Active state intervention to rebuild production capacity in the democratic nations.
I think a lot of people have this impression that China is able to make impossible cost savings in production with everything they touch. I’ve visited more Chinese production facilities than I care to remember. The best use stolen foreign technology and benefit from things like state subsidised energy, raw material inputs and working capital finance.
Most just rely on underpaid blokes in dungarees with no regard for their health and safety or to even bother paying them at all if they have a bad month or six.
You’d be surprised how even at the best run places, you walk in and think “bloody hell look at that inefficiency there where they’re just throwing bodies at the problem”. No better or worse than most Western production lines probably. Just that they cheat and our politicians are too glib and gullible to do anything about it.
Oh and the seemingly never ending monotony and soullessness of most of the country when you get away from the shiny bits. Even in distant Xinjiang, the CCP promotion of Han racial and cultural superiority gnawing away at what makes the place special and unique.
Another aspect of this is that because it's about personal identity, people tend to get very worked up about it and contemptuous of the other type. I admire Tim's ability not to do that in his post.
And, whatever Hancock said, we screwed up with care homes.
2 is wrong
3 is temporarily right, but will be wrong again soon
4 is wrong
Other than that, well done
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
UK deaths peaked in mid-Jan when we had vaccinated about 5% with first doses.
Even if we'd followed a French/German/Italian vaccination pace - we would have had 20% vaccinated with first dose by mid-April.
Also earlier lockdown has a much bigger impact than you are imagining (I think).
For instance, imagine a situation where cases grow at 25% a week when open, or decline at 5% a week if in lockdown. If you lockdown in week 10, you end up with 82 cases total. If you lockdown in week 5 and then open back up in week 10 -> you get 48 cases total. And if you had locked down for the first 5 weeks, and then stayed open for 10 weeks, you'd end up with 36 cases.
You have the same number of cases in week 15 under all scenarios, but your total number of cases is vastly different.
The most important is that I believe that most people are mostly reasonable most of the time. And I think it is this belief that means I think we could organise society where people cooperate to organise the economy, rather than compete.
I do not accept that Stalin and the rest were working from the same impulse.
On another note, why does the economist call us 'Britain' - rather than UK, or rather than consistituent nations?
1. France and Russia have both had more cases
2. Russia has more deaths, on a per million analysis there are a host of countries ahead of us.
3. Russia has more new cases. And we do massively more testing than anyone else.
4. Total rubbish. In the last 7 days Italy, Germany and France (as well as Russia) have all had more deaths than us.
Why do you write this stuff?
We have the evidence of the people who knew and worked with Mao, Stalin etc.
The violent bit came, when they found what they thought was opposition to their implementation. So round up and shoot the "Wreckers" etc....
The countries that we like to compare ourselves with- that we really ought to compare ourselves with- the likes of France, Germany, Benelux, Austria are all doing an awful lot better at keeping people alive.
In each case, within a few weeks or years, the Theory encountered stubborn reality - the crooked timber of human nature - and they were all forced to adapt, and they adapted by trying to hammer human beings so as to fit the system. They broke eggs to make omelettes
Millions died, and still die
Do you accept that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic? If not, why not?
Of serious countries, only Denmark and Austria have done more tests per million. We are third in the world (ignoring microstates - many of them anyway British territories like Bermuda or Gib)
And also bear in mind that we are doing far, far more testing than most countries. So we find more positives. But our positivity rate is lower.
And actually, the biggest country in Europe for deaths is Russia. Which is, you know, even bigger than the UK. See my first point.
Plus we sequence the positives unlike most nations. Hence why we'd done half the entire planets genetic sequencing.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-tests-per-thousand-people-smoothed-7-day?tab=chart&country=DEU~FRA~ITA~IRL~LVA~GBR~USA~CHE~SWE~ESP~SVN~SRB~POL~NOR~BEL~CAN~HUN~ISL~AUT
I have a lot of respect for Cummings but one thing I disagree with him on is criticising the PM for being like a trolley. Actually trolley like behaviour can be a very good thing as it gets you, eventually, to where you need to be. Try and abandon issues that fail, try and keep ones that work.
Sticking straight and narrow rigidly to one path may help more initially but in the long run means you miss out on the gains that weren't in your initial path and keep doing that which doesn't work.
But back of the envelope calculation suggests that even this much reduced testing is much *more* testing than in the UK.
But the myth of the UK doing massively more tests than anyone else refuses to die no matter how often debunked.
Lucky it's not a rugby tournament or you'd be obliged to cover it in Labour red roses...
I've probably become more anarchic in my thinking, but, again, this is a political term that's much misunderstood.
What I'm not so sure about is the history before that; This is quite a difficult area to figure out because cultural theories are so easy to cherry-pick so a resourceful person can prove anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/05/covid-wildly-successful-pop-up-coronabikes-test-german-love-of-order
Stalin genuinely believed in communism - we have the testimony of everyone around him.
The idea that a People's Democracy (aka a Communist Dictatorship) is more democratic than letting the Head Count vote for whoever is a long running sick joke. One that dates back to the Bolsheviks....
North Korea is trying to implement a variant of Fuckwit Communism bolted on to the religious veneration of a family of Emperors.
You seem to have settled in well 🙂
The comparison is with Benelux, France, and Germany.
Most countries have fucked this up somehow.
We seem to have fucked up more than we ought, and the blame rests with the government.
(Based on the 16-24s with antibodies at the start of March, which was prior to most of them having any chance for a jab).
Of course, some will have had antibody levels decay, but they will still have T-cell protection and can generate tailored antibodies quickly on exposure, so while they'd be infected, the viral load would be hopefully very low and far more likely to be asymptomatic or very mildly symptomatic, and their rate of passing it one would be much curtailed.
Reporter: 'What would it mean to you guys to stop it from coming home?'
#Den's Kasper Schmeichel: 'Has it ever been home?'
https://twitter.com/guardian_sport/status/1412705035184713730?s=20
Why don't you try getting some national per capita data and comparing them? Because the data is out there.
Or if you're struggling to find Germany in amongst the other countries its mixed in with then try this head to head comparison.
Who's spreading myths?
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1411415156014395405?s=20
https://twitter.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1411429411535134727?s=20
I'm sure that it's a statistical fluke that their Covid deaths net out with the lives saved by being careful, and Scandi countries have geographical benefits, but it's a helluva score.
In the aftermath of WWI, the idea was to remove all the things that had caused WWI. Or rather, the things that people thought had caused WWI
So treaties on the limitation of armaments, and the ending of various military pacts.
The idea was that the UK/Japanese alliance could conceivably threaten the US in the Pacific. Without the alliance, no one power could really threaten the other, providing the naval treaties were held to.
The Japanese government was taken over, starting in the 20s, by ever more extreme and Fascist elements, who regarded anything other than more battleships than everyone else on the planet, plus conquering China plus plus as evil and weak.
The idea that the British and Americans had done the dirty on them was their version of the "stab in the back" myth. The reality was that japan thing to conquer China was a farcical idea. But reality wasn't their strong suit.
In fact, the naval treaties and arms limitation worked in Japans favour. They never had even a fraction of the industrial capability required to build the insane fleet the militarists wanted.
Once the treaties were ditched and the Americans started building ships at economic capacity (not even max'd out!) this was spelled out.
Because the reality is that democracy and communism are mutually incompatible because when people have the right to vote and choose for themselves they don't choose communism so the only way for communism to actually work is to do what Marx and Engels called for which is to take and keep power by force.
Sillier still is to ignore his substantial point. Some of the UK Covid numbers are poor and almost certainly poorer than they needed to be.
We need to face up to that reality as well as the celebrating what went well. Who knows, we might learn something useful.
Some of us have been very critical of the poor quality goverence, poor quality academic advice and poor quality media coverage throughout. The public inquiry will unfortunately get bogged down in politics and leading figures trying to pass blame, but the reality is a wide range of organizations have been absolutely piss poor.
If you're going to spread outright lies and untruths, expect to be called out on it.
I've had some of that as insurance.
Read the Hagakure - a homage to the joy joy of The Samurai, written by a fanatic, long after the real Samurai age had ended. The Japanese fascists loved it.....
Beautiful failure is better than the wrong kind of success is the message. Oh, and long live death!
Read it and you can really understand Banzai charges......
The actual question is this one. Limit infections best, or limit infections unnecessary?
The scientists are saying limit infections is best route, so think less binary about restrictions.
Our genial host is spot on, the divergent from science is because of government over promising in first place, before getting there and having proper look around.
However scientists communication of what they mean by controlling through vaccination not herd immunity means in terms of practically achieving that, time frames, impact on business, and the sound virology behind it has been abysmal so far. But we need to listen to and understand this argument before saying scientists wrong, government right.