Apparently 15% of athletes at the Olympics are unvaccinated. I find that quite astonishingly stupid.
There are countries in the world without our fortuitous position WRT vaccines.
It's a bit of an insult to the world to hold a cult-of-strength help-the-advertisers nationalism fest during a global plague. It's not as if there'd be bloody riots if it didn't go ahead, cf. Juventus versus Liverpool, Heysel 1985.
Yeah. I think that the Olympics, not just Tokyo, the movement, may be on its last legs. Who wants it anymore?
Apparently 15% of athletes at the Olympics are unvaccinated. I find that quite astonishingly stupid.
There are countries in the world without our fortuitous position WRT vaccines.
It's a bit of an insult to the world to hold a cult-of-strength help-the-advertisers nationalism fest during a global plague. It's not as if there'd be bloody riots if it didn't go ahead, cf. Juventus versus Liverpool, Heysel 1985.
Yeah. I think that the Olympics, not just Tokyo, the movement, may be on its last legs. Who wants it anymore?
The next three host cities are booked.
But the number bidding for it is declining. 2032 was a one city race.
Apparently 15% of athletes at the Olympics are unvaccinated. I find that quite astonishingly stupid.
There are countries in the world without our fortuitous position WRT vaccines.
It's a bit of an insult to the world to hold a cult-of-strength help-the-advertisers nationalism fest during a global plague. It's not as if there'd be bloody riots if it didn't go ahead, cf. Juventus versus Liverpool, Heysel 1985.
Yeah. I think that the Olympics, not just Tokyo, the movement, may be on its last legs. Who wants it anymore?
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
But note that it still starts by implying that people should wait to be called. Its very first sentence is: The NHS will let you know when it is your turn to get the COVID-19 vaccination.
Perhaps that is supposed to mean wait till your age-group comes up but as everyone over 18 is now in scope, this instruction is either redundant or leaves people waiting for a call which will never come.
There’s probably several hundred thousand people in the country who aren’t known to the NHS.
They might have arrived two years ago on tourist visas and got stuck, be overstayers working illegally, be Irish or other legal immigrants who have never registered etc.
Definitely time to start offering walk-in centres with no NHS number required - and a promise of no immigration officers hanging around.
There’s also the converse problem, with millions of Brits living abroad who have been vaccinated abroad, who need to be able to upload their vaccines to the NHS database.
I would expect that to be related to the 8 week interval to the second dose.
If the decline in the Tory vote share is real, and not an outlier, I suspect it has little to do with tax rises, Cummings, alleged supermarket shortages, or even pinging.
I suspect that it's simply that a lot of people, not widely represented on here, are somewhat sceptical about setting people 'free' and loosening Covid restrictions even further at exactly the same time as cases are (were) rising fast and there are increases in hospitalisations and deaths, and before everybody (eligible and willing) has had their two vaccine doses. For some, the policy seems like madness.
If/when delta declines and then disappears, I'd expect a large Tory lead to reappear. Whenever Covid disappears from centre stage, the government will get a huge boost and will be forgiven everything. But then, gradually, other matters will come into play. Of course if Covid doesn't disappear from centre stage, then who knows?
Completely, utterly and totally disagree.
A return to "normality" will put the day-to-day activity of Government back in the spotlight and we'll see how this Government really functions and whether it can deliver.
I have my doubts - others may be more optimistic.
The point is it's never the big things like pandemics which damage Governments because the electorate rallies to support - it's happened all over Europe (from the leftish Government in Portugal through the centre-left Danish coalition to the centre-right Government in Greece). It's the little things - the errors, the misjudgements, the gaffes which become crises, scandals and led to Ministerial resignations.
It's the drip-drip of normality that does the damage - also, and let's be blunt, people get tired of the same old faces saying the same old things. Johnson will, I suspect, reshuffle next year to promote some of the alleged backbench "talent" and start to showcase the team for the next term.
The problem then becomes the young and ambitious look up and see old Boris blocking the way and that's when it all starts to get difficult for a Prime Minister.
There may be an opportunity for Starmer here but the fundamental problem he has is he has yet to spell out anything approaching a compelling reason to vote Labour. if you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, why would you vote for Starmer's Labour in 2024?
That, ultimately, is the only question worth asking and answering.
But the question can be flipped -
If you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, but are not really a Conservative, why would you vote Conservative again in 2024? - given Brexit is done and Jeremy Corbyn is on the allotment.
It’s almost certainly a thing. As it happens I think Fraser is a perpetually self justifying diddy but there’s probably a whole load of diddies out there.
Oh good, I think. But no - not per the article. Won't be voting Tory again but won't return to Labour either. He's homeless.
Decent sentiments in the article but a load of confused twaddle really. Sounds like he's now a One Nation Conservative and is (amazingly) surprised that what he voted for in Dec 19 has turned out to be not that.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Still lying about the severity of coronavirus, I see. Could we have the old favourite that only over 80s die from it? That most would have died of something else within a few months? That young people don't go to hospital?
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
Sounds like seventh heaven for readers of certain newspapers. Presumably those under house arrest wouldn't be allowed out even to buy food, so they'd need to rely on deliveries unless they'd "prepped" by stocking up, big time. Supermarket managers would have to be able to call in the robocops to detain any trouble-making barbarians who tried their luck and made it through the doors at Aldi, let alone Waitrose. Ditto bus drivers.
Exemption from vaccination would already have been decided prior to the offer, so in effect house arrest orders would be issued by medics. "We sent the offer. You didn't show up. Stamp. You're banned."
Are any other countries close yet to a policy of "You're declining the vaccination offer? Then stay in your house until you're told you're allowed to come out"?
Macron wouldn't dare. Not before the election in April anyway. He'd not only get smashed electorally (key observation: both Le Pen and Mélenchon are against the "pass sanitaire") but the Fifth Republic would lose control of the banlieues to an even greater extent than it has already. Automatic weapons would come out and you might well get civil war.
Er - this is French policy from September?
Are you making a prediction, or saying that you believe it's policy in France to introduce house arrest in September for vaccine refusers? It isn't.
Policy for September is compulsory vaccination for healthworkers who want to stay in their jobs. Already those without a "pass sanitaire" have been banned from events and cafés and restaurants. I think they are or soon will be banned from some shopping centres too. But they are not banned from all shops, and they are not subject to full-scale house arrest.
Incidentally France has a culture and history of "délation" that would make most Daily Express readers look like woke pinko liberals.
Reflect on to whom you are addressing your comments.
On of my old shipmates was on FB from Pattaya yesterday. He was playing golf and rattling a bar girl that looked like Steptoe's horse without a care in the world.
Time to send Steptoe's horse into the sunset and go scrabbling around used car lots. I had no idea people were paying £40-50,000 for old Japanese bangers from the 80's and 90's that most of us would have thrown away for scrap
Anything over 25 years old has gone flying up in price, as the US market love old Jap stuff and they have a 25 year ‘classic’ import law.
Not my cup of Pocari Sweat but they are very desirable. They are quite slow and usually need a BEAMS swap to get the best out of it.
But an insurance write off in 2006!
The insurance company saw it as just an old car, they will have looked at the ‘book’ price and decided that the cost of respraying it was more than it was worth. This particular, well looked after and quite rare example, was indeed a future classic.
There will be a good story to be told, of how an old lady realised the car she’d owned her whole life was suddenly worth a fortune.
But do people know? I very much doubt it. There must be thousands of people with these cars hanging around that can't be bothered to take them to the tip with no idea that they have a value. I imagine if they did they'd collapse the market. Every farm you drive past has five or six rust buckets around the place
Most of them are probably junk worth £50 to the local scrap metal dealer, but occasionally one turns out to be something rare worth money to a restorer.
‘Barn finds’ are a huge thing in the States, where someone just gets fed up fixing a car and parks it up, only for it to be found by their children several decades later.
There’s one shop I know of in Texas, who have found a nice little sideline to their usual business of working on Jeeps, going round the South buying up barn find E-types, 911s, Sprites etc, for restoration. Awesome to see these old classics get put back on the road. https://collinsbrosjeep.com/
As we all move over to EV appliances, there’s probably going to be a boom in classic cars. They’re not making any more of them!
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
The argument about overwhelming the NHS is completely one-sided.
It is always a demand problem. It is never, ever, a supplier problem. The NHS never anything but utterly and completely blameless in all of this. Questions about the size, scope, capacity and reach of the health services of the country here or elsewhere are simply not entertained.
I remember suggesting that, instead of spending 400bn on lockdown, we gave an extra 100bn to the health service. This, and all other suggestions for change in the system itself, are dismissed as impossible and completely impractical, now and always.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
At some point the National Health Service should stop paying for the treatment of the unvaccinated. They can get treatment but should pay for it themselves. If they demand personal choice so much, they can take the personal responsibility.
Great actor Anthony Quayle. Seriously overlooked from his generation. IIRC Alec Guinness was his best mate.
No offence to modern day thesps, but there were some seriously good actors of more or less that generation: Baker, Hawkins, Andrews, Mills, not to mention the knights. Most of them also served, some, as in Quayle’s case, enthusiastically (also Christopher Lee, Richard Todd). Gives an extra poignancy to all those post war British war films on which I was weaned.
I think I'd want to do a detailed analysis of events & where i thought likely US would win gold before betting on this... and frankly that's more work than it's worth! Best of luck to Quincel though.
Apparently 15% of athletes at the Olympics are unvaccinated. I find that quite astonishingly stupid.
There are countries in the world without our fortuitous position WRT vaccines.
It's a bit of an insult to the world to hold a cult-of-strength help-the-advertisers nationalism fest during a global plague. It's not as if there'd be bloody riots if it didn't go ahead, cf. Juventus versus Liverpool, Heysel 1985.
Yeah. I think that the Olympics, not just Tokyo, the movement, may be on its last legs. Who wants it anymore?
The next three host cities are booked.
But the number bidding for it is declining. 2032 was a one city race.
Presumably because the Games is so complex and ruinously expensive to host - which, I suspect is the root cause of the long-running commentary about its popularity declining. Very few countries can now afford it, and there's a list of host cities that have been saddled with huge debts and useless facilities after the jamboree has moved on.
The obvious solution is to cut the event significantly in size, but who is going to do the necessary and decide that perhaps half the sports need to get the chop?
If the decline in the Tory vote share is real, and not an outlier, I suspect it has little to do with tax rises, Cummings, alleged supermarket shortages, or even pinging.
I suspect that it's simply that a lot of people, not widely represented on here, are somewhat sceptical about setting people 'free' and loosening Covid restrictions even further at exactly the same time as cases are (were) rising fast and there are increases in hospitalisations and deaths, and before everybody (eligible and willing) has had their two vaccine doses. For some, the policy seems like madness.
If/when delta declines and then disappears, I'd expect a large Tory lead to reappear. Whenever Covid disappears from centre stage, the government will get a huge boost and will be forgiven everything. But then, gradually, other matters will come into play. Of course if Covid doesn't disappear from centre stage, then who knows?
Completely, utterly and totally disagree.
A return to "normality" will put the day-to-day activity of Government back in the spotlight and we'll see how this Government really functions and whether it can deliver.
I have my doubts - others may be more optimistic.
The point is it's never the big things like pandemics which damage Governments because the electorate rallies to support - it's happened all over Europe (from the leftish Government in Portugal through the centre-left Danish coalition to the centre-right Government in Greece). It's the little things - the errors, the misjudgements, the gaffes which become crises, scandals and led to Ministerial resignations.
It's the drip-drip of normality that does the damage - also, and let's be blunt, people get tired of the same old faces saying the same old things. Johnson will, I suspect, reshuffle next year to promote some of the alleged backbench "talent" and start to showcase the team for the next term.
The problem then becomes the young and ambitious look up and see old Boris blocking the way and that's when it all starts to get difficult for a Prime Minister.
There may be an opportunity for Starmer here but the fundamental problem he has is he has yet to spell out anything approaching a compelling reason to vote Labour. if you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, why would you vote for Starmer's Labour in 2024?
That, ultimately, is the only question worth asking and answering.
But the question can be flipped -
If you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, but are not really a Conservative, why would you vote Conservative again in 2024? - given Brexit is done and Jeremy Corbyn is on the allotment.
Is this not really back to the next Election being for the Tories to lose, rather than anybody else to win?
It's quite funny how everyone who 2 or 3 weeks was demonising BJ for "reckless reopening" is now demonising BJ for "not opening quickly enough". In BBC speak does that mean it is right because everyone is cross? Quite similar to midges and a camel, perhaps.
Great actor Anthony Quayle. Seriously overlooked from his generation. IIRC Alec Guinness was his best mate.
No offence to modern day thesps, but there were some seriously good actors of more or less that generation: Baker, Hawkins, Andrews, Mills, not to mention the knights. Most of them also served, some, as in Quayle’s case, enthusiastically (also Christopher Lee, Richard Todd). Gives an extra poignancy to all those post war British war films on which I was weaned.
Christopher Lee, quite apart from his wartime service and acting, also witnessed the last public guillotine in France and recorded a heavy metal album. The kind of man you don’t meet everyday.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
Holocaust survivors have come forward and said what is happening now parallels the rise of the nazis
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Still lying about the severity of coronavirus, I see. Could we have the old favourite that only over 80s die from it? That most would have died of something else within a few months? That young people don't go to hospital?
--AS
Shes talking about double vaccinated people. Bit of a difference there
It's still a lie to claim that they get a bad cold at worst. Contrarian has been lying about this pandemic since the start.
So polling conventional wisdom says it takes 3 days for "an event" to percolate into the polling.
The fieldwork for this You Gov is 3 days after the Boris/Sunak will they won't they self isolate farce.
This is identical to what happened with the wall paper Proud proclamation that no one cares. Point to immediate polls that don't have the reaction to the event in to prove that no-one cares. Shitting it when the polls start reflecting the event. Bold swagger once the even fades after 7 days.
Seven days is how long an even takes to work out if it is a blip.
The problem this time maybe, is events are rolling up like London buses. None for a while and then lots come at once
Johnson's bad behaviour comes and goes, and we forgive and forget. Empty shelves, difficulty obtaining fuel, bins not being emptied, cancelled holidays, should they gain traction stay in the mind for generations.
Voters who weren't even born in 1978/79 remember the Winter of Discontent.
That's if they do come.
The media babbling about empty shelves makes them look ridiculous if the shelves in the local supermarkets are full.
And some middle class prat in London complaining that they cannot get a particular brand of balsamic in Waitrose is a source of amusement to much of the country.
Though I have a suspicion that bins not being emptied is a potential problem - suburbia produces a lot of garden waste in the summer.
I wonder what the ratio is between the following 2 things -
(i) Gurus of Grim complaining about "middle class prats" complaining about the lack of (insert poncy product of choice) in Waitrose.
(ii) Actual middle class prats actually complaining about the lack of (random poncy product) in Waitrose.
I'm going for about 1000 to 1.
In which case it would show that there is no shortage in Waitrose.
And that the media babbling about empty shelves are only making themselves look ridiculous.
Of course this should already be apparent after the 'there are no strawberries in the shops' claims of 2017:
The highly educated, successful, professional who lives in an affluent part of London, travels a lot, particularly enjoys skiing, shops at Waitrose, supports Labour and voted Remain. This person offends something quite deep in you, Richard, it seems to me. There's something just fundamentally wrong about them in your eyes.
But note that it still starts by implying that people should wait to be called. Its very first sentence is: The NHS will let you know when it is your turn to get the COVID-19 vaccination.
Perhaps that is supposed to mean wait till your age-group comes up but as everyone over 18 is now in scope, this instruction is either redundant or leaves people waiting for a call which will never come.
That page says you can book without knowing your NHS number, not that your vaccination will go ahead if you haven't got one. The numbers are issued at birth but not all British citizens were born in Britain.
So polling conventional wisdom says it takes 3 days for "an event" to percolate into the polling.
The fieldwork for this You Gov is 3 days after the Boris/Sunak will they won't they self isolate farce.
This is identical to what happened with the wall paper Proud proclamation that no one cares. Point to immediate polls that don't have the reaction to the event in to prove that no-one cares. Shitting it when the polls start reflecting the event. Bold swagger once the even fades after 7 days.
Seven days is how long an even takes to work out if it is a blip.
The problem this time maybe, is events are rolling up like London buses. None for a while and then lots come at once
Johnson's bad behaviour comes and goes, and we forgive and forget. Empty shelves, difficulty obtaining fuel, bins not being emptied, cancelled holidays, should they gain traction stay in the mind for generations.
Voters who weren't even born in 1978/79 remember the Winter of Discontent.
That's if they do come.
The media babbling about empty shelves makes them look ridiculous if the shelves in the local supermarkets are full.
And some middle class prat in London complaining that they cannot get a particular brand of balsamic in Waitrose is a source of amusement to much of the country.
Though I have a suspicion that bins not being emptied is a potential problem - suburbia produces a lot of garden waste in the summer.
I wonder what the ratio is between the following 2 things -
(i) Gurus of Grim complaining about "middle class prats" complaining about the lack of (insert poncy product of choice) in Waitrose.
(ii) Actual middle class prats actually complaining about the lack of (random poncy product) in Waitrose.
I'm going for about 1000 to 1.
In which case it would show that there is no shortage in Waitrose.
And that the media babbling about empty shelves are only making themselves look ridiculous.
Of course this should already be apparent after the 'there are no strawberries in the shops' claims of 2017:
The highly educated, successful, professional who lives in an affluent part of London, travels a lot, particularly enjoys skiing, shops at Waitrose, supports Labour and voted Remain. This person offends something quite deep in you, Richard, it seems to me. There's something just fundamentally wrong about them in your eyes.
The classic car market in general has been booming these past few years, a combination of a new generation of investors looking to buy cars of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and of a flight to assets as investments following the last recession. The art market has been the same, and we all regularly discuss the property market and stock market on here.
A 2010-13 550-2/560-4 manual Gallardo would be a very decent investment (as long you don't crash it). The last manual Ferraris have exploded in value and the Lambos will inevitably be next.
McLarens go the other way. The CEO of McLaren Automotive was selling his 720 and it lost nearly £100,000 in value in less than two years. Depreciating at a grand a week!
Is there an obvious reason why McLarens are much less collectible?
There’s a lot of the ‘regular’ models around as they oversupplied the market, and they’re expensive to maintain because there’s few non-dealer options for service.
They’ve cut production quite a bit now, and more independent service options are becoming available over time - so they’ll probably be easier to run in future.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
Hardly a recommendation to get vaccinated.
You have yet to provide a credible reason why you haven't got the vaccine.
By credible, I don't mean a reason that makes sense to other people, I mean one that makes sense to you.
That's a fair point. I don't believe any of the conspiracy theory stuff, but I also know people who have been very off colour after vaccination.
I don't want to go into details because I would be accused of being an anti-vaxxer. But it has occurred to me that acquiring immunity via getting the disease might be been much easier.
I see. Not having it because you're scared of the side effects. I understand that actually. It's odd to voluntarily take something you know will quite possibly make you feel ill for a few days.
I felt exactly that myself and seriously considered skipping it. I had to force myself to do it. Gave myself a talking to and pushed my rational side to the fore. Just like I do when I get on a plane.
So you have not (as yet) managed to push YOUR rational side to the fore on this one - is my conclusion. Would this be a fair way of expressing it?
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
Holocaust survivors have come forward and said what is happening now parallels the rise of the nazis
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
To be fair to contrarian but he is right and you are wrong. We didn’t get rid of ID cards until 1952 when they’d been in force longer in peacetime than in wartime.
So polling conventional wisdom says it takes 3 days for "an event" to percolate into the polling.
The fieldwork for this You Gov is 3 days after the Boris/Sunak will they won't they self isolate farce.
This is identical to what happened with the wall paper Proud proclamation that no one cares. Point to immediate polls that don't have the reaction to the event in to prove that no-one cares. Shitting it when the polls start reflecting the event. Bold swagger once the even fades after 7 days.
Seven days is how long an even takes to work out if it is a blip.
The problem this time maybe, is events are rolling up like London buses. None for a while and then lots come at once
Johnson's bad behaviour comes and goes, and we forgive and forget. Empty shelves, difficulty obtaining fuel, bins not being emptied, cancelled holidays, should they gain traction stay in the mind for generations.
Voters who weren't even born in 1978/79 remember the Winter of Discontent.
That's if they do come.
The media babbling about empty shelves makes them look ridiculous if the shelves in the local supermarkets are full.
And some middle class prat in London complaining that they cannot get a particular brand of balsamic in Waitrose is a source of amusement to much of the country.
Though I have a suspicion that bins not being emptied is a potential problem - suburbia produces a lot of garden waste in the summer.
I wonder what the ratio is between the following 2 things -
(i) Gurus of Grim complaining about "middle class prats" complaining about the lack of (insert poncy product of choice) in Waitrose.
(ii) Actual middle class prats actually complaining about the lack of (random poncy product) in Waitrose.
I'm going for about 1000 to 1.
In which case it would show that there is no shortage in Waitrose.
And that the media babbling about empty shelves are only making themselves look ridiculous.
Of course this should already be apparent after the 'there are no strawberries in the shops' claims of 2017:
The highly educated, successful, professional who lives in an affluent part of London, travels a lot, particularly enjoys skiing, shops at Waitrose, supports Labour and voted Remain. This person offends something quite deep in you, Richard, it seems to me. There's something just fundamentally wrong about them in your eyes.
Waitrose really is a sort of cultural bellwether with a rep it doesn’t deserve,
Found this on twitter They're simultaneously saying that people who take the rona jabs can still spread the virus, whilst claiming those who don't take it are putting those who do at risk. They're not even attempting to be coherent. It's pure divide & conquer. Turning neighbour against neighbour.
11:41 AM · Jul 24, 2021·Twitter for Android
Both are true. If you have the vaccination, you might still spread the virus, but it's less likely. If you don't, you are definitely putting people at risk.
Once again, if comparative studies of VE in the UK vs Israel shows higher efficacy in the UK because of the 12 week gap then there will be a lot of egg on a lot of faces. Both domestic and international. I remember the expert I spoke to said a longer gap between vaccine doses was highly likely to boost long term efficacy as that's what they'd observed from other vaccines which had been set up to look at correct dosing gaps.
At the time I remember being against it, but then when the expert explained to me that getting first dose coverage up was a better approach and it had a possible side benefit of better immunity I changed my mind. They specifically said "3 weeks is a very short gap, Pfizer will have picked the minimum time to get a quick trial" and "really they'd have wanted to wait for at least 4 weeks and also test intervals of 6, 8 and 12 weeks" but that would add at least three months onto the length of the trial.
Imagine the fury of many if the UK chose the right strategy of maximising first doses (a good thing) and lengthening the period between doses (a good thing).
Do you know which strategy each country has been following ?
Most of them extended dosage gaps, and it is documented somewhere. AFAICS the purest example has actually been Canada.
The fury should more correctly be about people who died unnecessarily.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
Holocaust survivors have come forward and said what is happening now parallels the rise of the nazis
Cite for that?
It's out there mate I havent got a link but it's out there. These are the people who would know
If you haven't seen it, how do you know it's out there? FFS.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
The argument about overwhelming the NHS is completely one-sided.
It is always a demand problem. It is never, ever, a supplier problem. The NHS never anything but utterly and completely blameless in all of this. Questions about the size, scope, capacity and reach of the health services of the country here or elsewhere are simply not entertained.
I remember suggesting that, instead of spending 400bn on lockdown, we gave an extra 100bn to the health service. This, and all other suggestions for change in the system itself, are dismissed as impossible and completely impractical, now and always.
The NHS is a hungry beast. Whatever you feed it will not be enough!
If the decline in the Tory vote share is real, and not an outlier, I suspect it has little to do with tax rises, Cummings, alleged supermarket shortages, or even pinging.
I suspect that it's simply that a lot of people, not widely represented on here, are somewhat sceptical about setting people 'free' and loosening Covid restrictions even further at exactly the same time as cases are (were) rising fast and there are increases in hospitalisations and deaths, and before everybody (eligible and willing) has had their two vaccine doses. For some, the policy seems like madness.
If/when delta declines and then disappears, I'd expect a large Tory lead to reappear. Whenever Covid disappears from centre stage, the government will get a huge boost and will be forgiven everything. But then, gradually, other matters will come into play. Of course if Covid doesn't disappear from centre stage, then who knows?
Completely, utterly and totally disagree.
A return to "normality" will put the day-to-day activity of Government back in the spotlight and we'll see how this Government really functions and whether it can deliver.
I have my doubts - others may be more optimistic.
The point is it's never the big things like pandemics which damage Governments because the electorate rallies to support - it's happened all over Europe (from the leftish Government in Portugal through the centre-left Danish coalition to the centre-right Government in Greece). It's the little things - the errors, the misjudgements, the gaffes which become crises, scandals and led to Ministerial resignations.
It's the drip-drip of normality that does the damage - also, and let's be blunt, people get tired of the same old faces saying the same old things. Johnson will, I suspect, reshuffle next year to promote some of the alleged backbench "talent" and start to showcase the team for the next term.
The problem then becomes the young and ambitious look up and see old Boris blocking the way and that's when it all starts to get difficult for a Prime Minister.
There may be an opportunity for Starmer here but the fundamental problem he has is he has yet to spell out anything approaching a compelling reason to vote Labour. if you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, why would you vote for Starmer's Labour in 2024?
That, ultimately, is the only question worth asking and answering.
But the question can be flipped -
If you voted Conservative in 2019 to end the Brexit quagmire and stop Jeremy Corbyn, but are not really a Conservative, why would you vote Conservative again in 2024? - given Brexit is done and Jeremy Corbyn is on the allotment.
Is this not really back to the next Election being for the Tories to lose, rather than anybody else to win?
It's quite funny how everyone who 2 or 3 weeks was demonising BJ for "reckless reopening" is now demonising BJ for "not opening quickly enough". In BBC speak does that mean it is right because everyone is cross? Quite similar to midges and a camel, perhaps.
Johnson needs no demonizing. You can't drain an empty pool.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
At some point the National Health Service should stop paying for the treatment of the unvaccinated. They can get treatment but should pay for it themselves. If they demand personal choice so much, they can take the personal responsibility.
What if they haven't got the money or the likelihood of earning it? Seize their assets? What then?
Found this on twitter They're simultaneously saying that people who take the rona jabs can still spread the virus, whilst claiming those who don't take it are putting those who do at risk. They're not even attempting to be coherent. It's pure divide & conquer. Turning neighbour against neighbour.
11:41 AM · Jul 24, 2021·Twitter for Android
Leaving aside the fact that bears no resemblance to your earlier claim that this is 'like the early stages of the Holocaust,' you haven't provided a link or said which account it's from, so it is totally worthless as evidence for your claim.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
Holocaust survivors have come forward and said what is happening now parallels the rise of the nazis
Cite for that?
It's out there mate I havent got a link but it's out there. These are the people who would know
I think the snobbery against London is as bad as the snobbery against the rest of the country. I happen to think there are knobs wherever you come from
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
Hardly a recommendation to get vaccinated.
You have yet to provide a credible reason why you haven't got the vaccine.
By credible, I don't mean a reason that makes sense to other people, I mean one that makes sense to you.
That's a fair point. I don't believe any of the conspiracy theory stuff, but I also know people who have been very off colour after vaccination.
I don't want to go into details because I would be accused of being an anti-vaxxer. But it has occurred to me that acquiring immunity via getting the disease might be been much easier.
I see. Not having it because you're scared of the side effects. I understand that actually. It's odd to voluntarily take something you know will quite possibly make you feel ill for a few days.
I felt exactly that myself and seriously considered skipping it. I had to force myself to do it. Gave myself a talking to and pushed my rational side to the fore. Just like I do when I get on a plane.
So you have not (as yet) managed to push YOUR rational side to the fore on this one - is my conclusion. Would this be a fair way of expressing it?
I have very little scientific knowledge but if I had to be concerned about one vaccine, it would be Moderna. Here, you have a company that was near bankruptcy, found a wonder product that saved it in the form of a Covid vaccine, is using a new type of technology whose trials would normally take a decade but which have been rushed through during the pandemic and has liability waivers in place if anything goes wrong.
Not enough of a reverse ferret if it's "consider". Very much a quarter-baked attempt when what they really need is a big public information campaign begging people to get AZ while emphasising it's a safe and effective vaccine.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
well show some names, links , etc or just keep spouting bollox, any reds under the sofa while you are at it.
Not enough of a reverse ferret if it's "consider". Very much a quarter-baked attempt when what they really need is a big public information campaign begging people to get AZ while emphasising it's a safe and effective vaccine.
They have a big big problem. The sort of lockdowns they previously used are not going to stop Delta.
Is there an obvious reason why McLarens are much less collectible?
Brilliant driving experience but horrendous ownership experience.
They are a subscale OEM without the efficiencies of the production engineering discipline that comes with being part of a larger group and that shows in the quality. They make £200k+ cars with doors that are held together with double sided tape. If an engineer at Porsche proposed that, they'd be taken out the back and shot. They are wracked with reliability issues and the experience you get at the dealers when something does go wrong occupies the zone exactly equidistant between insult and farce.
I think the snobbery against London is as bad as the snobbery against the rest of the country. I happen to think there are knobs wherever you come from
Good thing London has all that extra money and public services to comfort it against the snobbery.
In all seriousness as a Yorkshireman, I've nothing against any region of the UK, I'm not a snob against London and I think London is great. I just want my own region to have a fair share and I think I should be allowed to think that without it appearing like I want to take something away from London.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Holocaust survivors are saying vaxports for nightclubs are the slippery slope to Belsen?
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
Hardly a recommendation to get vaccinated.
You have yet to provide a credible reason why you haven't got the vaccine.
By credible, I don't mean a reason that makes sense to other people, I mean one that makes sense to you.
That's a fair point. I don't believe any of the conspiracy theory stuff, but I also know people who have been very off colour after vaccination.
I don't want to go into details because I would be accused of being an anti-vaxxer. But it has occurred to me that acquiring immunity via getting the disease might be been much easier.
I see. Not having it because you're scared of the side effects. I understand that actually. It's odd to voluntarily take something you know will quite possibly make you feel ill for a few days.
I felt exactly that myself and seriously considered skipping it. I had to force myself to do it. Gave myself a talking to and pushed my rational side to the fore. Just like I do when I get on a plane.
So you have not (as yet) managed to push YOUR rational side to the fore on this one - is my conclusion. Would this be a fair way of expressing it?
I have very little scientific knowledge but if I had to be concerned about one vaccine, it would be Moderna. Here, you have a company that was near bankruptcy, found a wonder product that saved it in the form of a Covid vaccine, is using a new type of technology whose trials would normally take a decade but which have been rushed through during the pandemic and has liability waivers in place if anything goes wrong.
That's completely ridiculous. Moderna received $2bn in funding from, wait for it, the Trump administration to develop the vaccine.
Honestly, I didn't have you down as an anti-vaxxer. This is the kind of shite that makes me think the vaccine passport is a good idea and people like you who don't take it should be left out in the cold until you do.
Apparently 15% of athletes at the Olympics are unvaccinated. I find that quite astonishingly stupid.
There are countries in the world without our fortuitous position WRT vaccines.
It's a bit of an insult to the world to hold a cult-of-strength help-the-advertisers nationalism fest during a global plague. It's not as if there'd be bloody riots if it didn't go ahead, cf. Juventus versus Liverpool, Heysel 1985.
Yeah. I think that the Olympics, not just Tokyo, the movement, may be on its last legs. Who wants it anymore?
The next three host cities are booked.
Giving it to Brisbane doesn't exactly scream that they've got a series of world cities lining up gagging for it. I'd have assumed a commonwealth games would have been a big deal for there.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
So polling conventional wisdom says it takes 3 days for "an event" to percolate into the polling.
The fieldwork for this You Gov is 3 days after the Boris/Sunak will they won't they self isolate farce.
This is identical to what happened with the wall paper Proud proclamation that no one cares. Point to immediate polls that don't have the reaction to the event in to prove that no-one cares. Shitting it when the polls start reflecting the event. Bold swagger once the even fades after 7 days.
Seven days is how long an even takes to work out if it is a blip.
The problem this time maybe, is events are rolling up like London buses. None for a while and then lots come at once
Johnson's bad behaviour comes and goes, and we forgive and forget. Empty shelves, difficulty obtaining fuel, bins not being emptied, cancelled holidays, should they gain traction stay in the mind for generations.
Voters who weren't even born in 1978/79 remember the Winter of Discontent.
That's if they do come.
The media babbling about empty shelves makes them look ridiculous if the shelves in the local supermarkets are full.
And some middle class prat in London complaining that they cannot get a particular brand of balsamic in Waitrose is a source of amusement to much of the country.
Though I have a suspicion that bins not being emptied is a potential problem - suburbia produces a lot of garden waste in the summer.
I wonder what the ratio is between the following 2 things -
(i) Gurus of Grim complaining about "middle class prats" complaining about the lack of (insert poncy product of choice) in Waitrose.
(ii) Actual middle class prats actually complaining about the lack of (random poncy product) in Waitrose.
I'm going for about 1000 to 1.
In which case it would show that there is no shortage in Waitrose.
And that the media babbling about empty shelves are only making themselves look ridiculous.
Of course this should already be apparent after the 'there are no strawberries in the shops' claims of 2017:
The highly educated, successful, professional who lives in an affluent part of London, travels a lot, particularly enjoys skiing, shops at Waitrose, supports Labour and voted Remain. This person offends something quite deep in you, Richard, it seems to me. There's something just fundamentally wrong about them in your eyes.
Waitrose really is a sort of cultural bellwether with a rep it doesn’t deserve,
Its rep is unmerited both ways -
1. It isn't full of effete trendies and bumptious mumsnets.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Have you ever met any? I have, many times, and I am calling bullshit.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
We are not dismissing Holocaust survivors. We are dismissing you. Holocaust survivors are not saying these things. If they were you could send us evidence. You can’t.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
No, we’re saying you are exploiting the Holocaust for your own ends.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Have you ever met any? I have, many times, and I am calling bullshit.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
By all means carry on if you're enjoying it but it's a Troll obvs.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Holocaust survivors are saying vaxports for nightclubs are the slippery slope to Belsen?
Holocaust survivors who find such comparisons disgusting and offensive, yes, those that think they have merit, not so much.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
Mass murder in Germany started with the physically and mentally disabled - before death camps. Hundreds of thousands were forcibly sterilised beginning in 1933, and hundreds of thousands were murdered from 1939.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The issue as you know (whether you agree with it) is not about protecting the voluntary unvaxxed per se, but the implications for eg. the NHS. If people can't get their cancer operations because the hospitals are full of the voluntary unvaxxed then they will have some cause for complaint...
If that happens given most of the unvaccinated are relatively young then something will have gone badly wrong
Not really. For a start, the debate is about contrarian. Not the young. Secondly its long established that the young can get hospitalised by Covid. In general, less likely, and much more likely to recover, but in sufficient numbers to cause problems. And problems which are completely avoidable with higher levels of vaccination.
Our authoritarian government is trying to sell to you the principle of control. The principle that the fundamentally uncontrollable (nature), can be controlled, if only we all obey enough.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
Yes, you are just like the Jews through the various pogroms. Get a grip. We had ID cards during the crisis of the early 1940s. We ended them when the crisis was over.
Holocaust survivors have come forward and said what is happening now parallels the rise of the nazis
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Have you ever met any? I have, many times, and I am calling bullshit.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
By all means carry on if you're enjoying it but it's a Troll obvs.
A Russian one pissed off with the vaccine rollout, I'm guessing.
That would explain the casual racism, the forgery, the mindless abuse and the lies.
Wasn't there another one a few weeks back who claimed all BA pilots had died of CV19? As I recall, although I was at work and missed the fun, you all battered that one to a pulp.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
That's not what he said at all, because holocaust survivors drawing political lessons from their experience wouldn't be misusing the holocaust, it would be learning the appropriate lessons from that dark bit of history, using it is reasonable - it's when other people try to use it for completely unrelated stuff that it is misuse.
I'm opposed to compulsion when it comes to medical treatment, including vaccinations, and there are worrying parallels with forced medical treatment in authoritarian regimes, including, say, the forced sterilisations in China as part of the one-child policy. It's possible to oppose forced vaccination, or coerced vaccination, without misusing the holocaust to do so.
So polling conventional wisdom says it takes 3 days for "an event" to percolate into the polling.
The fieldwork for this You Gov is 3 days after the Boris/Sunak will they won't they self isolate farce.
This is identical to what happened with the wall paper Proud proclamation that no one cares. Point to immediate polls that don't have the reaction to the event in to prove that no-one cares. Shitting it when the polls start reflecting the event. Bold swagger once the even fades after 7 days.
Seven days is how long an even takes to work out if it is a blip.
The problem this time maybe, is events are rolling up like London buses. None for a while and then lots come at once
Johnson's bad behaviour comes and goes, and we forgive and forget. Empty shelves, difficulty obtaining fuel, bins not being emptied, cancelled holidays, should they gain traction stay in the mind for generations.
Voters who weren't even born in 1978/79 remember the Winter of Discontent.
That's if they do come.
The media babbling about empty shelves makes them look ridiculous if the shelves in the local supermarkets are full.
And some middle class prat in London complaining that they cannot get a particular brand of balsamic in Waitrose is a source of amusement to much of the country.
Though I have a suspicion that bins not being emptied is a potential problem - suburbia produces a lot of garden waste in the summer.
I wonder what the ratio is between the following 2 things -
(i) Gurus of Grim complaining about "middle class prats" complaining about the lack of (insert poncy product of choice) in Waitrose.
(ii) Actual middle class prats actually complaining about the lack of (random poncy product) in Waitrose.
I'm going for about 1000 to 1.
In which case it would show that there is no shortage in Waitrose.
And that the media babbling about empty shelves are only making themselves look ridiculous.
Of course this should already be apparent after the 'there are no strawberries in the shops' claims of 2017:
The highly educated, successful, professional who lives in an affluent part of London, travels a lot, particularly enjoys skiing, shops at Waitrose, supports Labour and voted Remain. This person offends something quite deep in you, Richard, it seems to me. There's something just fundamentally wrong about them in your eyes.
No - each to their own and the world would be a boring place if everyone was the same is my view.
But I am amused that such people are viewed as 'typical'.
Leading to the bafflement of such people when they are outvoted by those who live in places which they couldn't find on a map. Pauline Kael's apocryphal quote being a classic example.
But let me reverse your proposition - you think there is something fundamentally right about the person you described. With perhaps some personal yearning involved ? See your previous comments about needing to go to London to have 'power and influence' and to benefit from house price inflation.
I take it he was a PBer of yore with similar views?
More a denier, though I'd imagine the crossover here is pretty large. People who tend to talk about the Holocaust in this manner are also highly likely to make light of it in general.
I think the snobbery against London is as bad as the snobbery against the rest of the country. I happen to think there are knobs wherever you come from
Good thing London has all that extra money and public services to comfort it against the snobbery.
In all seriousness as a Yorkshireman, I've nothing against any region of the UK, I'm not a snob against London and I think London is great. I just want my own region to have a fair share and I think I should be allowed to think that without it appearing like I want to take something away from London.
I remember visiting Middlesbrough in 2002 when I had a nice bijou basement flat just off Upper Street N1, living the North London dream, and thinking “we have a big problem here”. It felt like a different country. That was my first sense of the problem that, 14 years later, gave us Brexit.
Is there this cohort with covid vaccination ? Aside from a very specific Pfizer allergy which mean switching over to AZ I haven't come across any examples ?
That was a very good question, and anecdotally, a friend of a relative with cancer could not get the vaccine because of her treatment (although she's already had Covid). However after doing a little research, it seems people with cancer, and most undergoing treatment, can be vaccinated.
So perhaps there are not as many as I supposed. Someone in medicine might know more ...
I take it he was a PBer of yore with similar views?
Not quite. He wouldn't have compared the current situation to the Holocaust because he was convinced the Holocaust never happened. A full-blown denier. More obsessive even than Robert Faurisson or David Irving.
That's why he was banned, although he was a useful commentator on American polling.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
Mate I will give you the links when I find them. As a historian of the holocaust it upsets me you dismiss holocaust survivors in the way you do. They see the parallels to nazi germany...but of course you know better
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
Mate I will give you the links when I find them. As a historian of the holocaust it upsets me you dismiss holocaust survivors in the way you do. They see the parallels to nazi germany...but of course you know better
Yes. Because I am both highly intelligent and a minor expert in the field, and you're clearly lying.
And, indeed, @Theuniondivvie has proved you are lying. What has been happening instead is that there have been claims that this is like the start of the Holocaust, which understandably upsets Holocaust survivors.
Nobody is dismissing Holocaust survivors - except you. If that upsets you, stop doing it.
Edit - incidentally, if you make a claim that you say is based on evidence, that evidence needs to be provided at once. Not at some unspecified future date. Show some integrity and moral courage, and withdraw your claims. You've clearly looked for evidence and not found it (your unlinked Tweet above proves that) because it isn't there.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
Mate I will give you the links when I find them. As a historian of the holocaust it upsets me you dismiss holocaust survivors in the way you do. They see the parallels to nazi germany...but of course you know better
You are the one making ridiculous claims without any evidence.
It can be quite blackly funny reading people who plainly think the Holocaust did happen (and was a good thing) or at any rate, ought to have happened, pretending that it did not.
I remember in his History of the Jews, Paul Johnson cited one Egyptian newspaper which argued in the course of one article that (a) the Holocaust never happened , but (b) if it had, it was a good thing and (c) was orchestrated by Zionists in collaboration iwth the Nazis.
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
At some point the National Health Service should stop paying for the treatment of the unvaccinated. They can get treatment but should pay for it themselves. If they demand personal choice so much, they can take the personal responsibility.
What if they haven't got the money or the likelihood of earning it? Seize their assets? What then?
Seizure of assets seems reasonable. If they genuinely have nothing left then I could countenance paying for their recklessness.
It can be quite blackly funny reading people who plainly think the Holocaust did happen (and was a good thing) or at any rate, ought to have happened, pretending that it did not.
I remember in his History of the Jews, Paul Johnson cited one Egyptian newspaper which argued in the course of one article that (a) the Holocaust never happened , but (b) if it had, it was a good thing and (c) was orchestrated by Zionists in collaboration iwth the Nazis.
THere was also quite an involved meme in the works of Rassinier and Faurisson that because the West German government paid hardly any reparations to Israel for deaths in the Holocaust, that showed there weren't many.
Apparently not understanding that actually, they were resettlement grants for survivors - which would rather tend to confirm how few survivors there were...
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
Mate I will give you the links when I find them. As a historian of the holocaust it upsets me you dismiss holocaust survivors in the way you do. They see the parallels to nazi germany...but of course you know better
Yes. Because I am both highly intelligent and a minor expert in the field, and you're clearly lying.
And, indeed, @Theuniondivvie has proved you are lying. What has been happening instead is that there have been claims that this is like the start of the Holocaust, which understandably upsets Holocaust survivors.
Nobody is dismissing Holocaust survivors - except you. If that upsets you, stop doing it.
Edit - incidentally, if you make a claim that you say is based on evidence, that evidence needs to be provided at once. Not at some unspecified future date. Show some integrity and moral courage, and withdraw your claims. You've clearly looked for evidence and not found it (your unlinked Tweet above proves that) because it isn't there.
It can be quite blackly funny reading people who plainly think the Holocaust did happen (and was a good thing) or at any rate, ought to have happened, pretending that it did not.
I remember in his History of the Jews, Paul Johnson cited one Egyptian newspaper which argued in the course of one article that (a) the Holocaust never happened , but (b) if it had, it was a good thing and (c) was orchestrated by Zionists in collaboration iwth the Nazis.
Was the primary source for point C a certain Ken Livingstone?
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Have you ever met any? I have, many times, and I am calling bullshit.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
By all means carry on if you're enjoying it but it's a Troll obvs.
A Russian one pissed off with the vaccine rollout, I'm guessing.
That would explain the casual racism, the forgery, the mindless abuse and the lies.
Wasn't there another one a few weeks back who claimed all BA pilots had died of CV19? As I recall, although I was at work and missed the fun, you all battered that one to a pulp.
Yes there was. Very similar mode of expression too. So similar in fact that ...
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
There is still a chance, albeit quite small, of catching Covid from someone who is unvaccinated and then being hospitalised or dying, even for the double-vaccinated.
Your attitude is putting ither at risk.
And so to counter that very very small risk, you propose creating a two tier society based on the principle medical apartheid. You propose fundamentally altering the balance between state and individual.
OK.
The problem really is that the emerging picture is such that covid can be spread by both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. The only significant advantage of vaccination is that it reduces the risk of death and hospitalisations. So the more people get vaccinated the more the country can open up as the virus can spread but doesn't overwhelm hospitals. If people don't get vaccinated then the hospitals go downhill.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
At some point the National Health Service should stop paying for the treatment of the unvaccinated. They can get treatment but should pay for it themselves. If they demand personal choice so much, they can take the personal responsibility.
What if they haven't got the money or the likelihood of earning it? Seize their assets? What then?
Seizure of assets seems reasonable. If they genuinely have nothing left then I could countenance paying for their recklessness.
Would be quite amusing if Covid leads to the end of the NHS's founding principle of free at the point of use - dare I say it could be the first good thing it's done for us if it opened the floodgates to wider reform once the Rubicon is crossed.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
To be fair mate theres a strong whiff of antisemitism in what you said there. Are you saying Jews exploit the holocaust for their own ends...its what your implying mate
You are a liar, as well as an idiot.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
Mate I will give you the links when I find them. As a historian of the holocaust it upsets me you dismiss holocaust survivors in the way you do. They see the parallels to nazi germany...but of course you know better
Well, banned with a day of joining. That was a ride.
I can't find anything on the web about holocaust survivors comparing Covid vaccination to the Nazis, or the holocaust, but lots about them opposing such comparisons, or receiving anti-semitic abuse for supporting Covid vaccination.
I take it he was a PBer of yore with similar views?
Not quite. He wouldn't have compared the current situation to the Holocaust because he was convinced the Holocaust never happened. A full-blown denier. More obsessive even than Robert Faurisson or David Irving.
That's why he was banned, although he was a useful commentator on American polling.
He wrote interesting thread headers about using by-elections, and swingback from them, to forecast general elections, and had a lot of knowledge of electoral history in Liverpool, but he was never able to stay away from that one topic.
Remember the nazis didnt start with death camps. It started with subtle discrimination against the Jews.
There was no 'subtle discrimination.' It was out and out brutal repression from the start, including beatings, arson attacks, arrests and confiscation of property, from 1933-34 onwards.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
Holocaust survivors are saying this mate not me. Presumably holocaust survivors dont know what they are talking about. Fair enough it's a view
Give me some evidence of this. An actual statement from a verified account of a genuine survivor.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
Mate I've seen the videos in time I may be able to give you a link. You casually dismissing holocaust survivors like this does not sit well with me
Have you ever met any? I have, many times, and I am calling bullshit.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
By all means carry on if you're enjoying it but it's a Troll obvs.
A Russian one pissed off with the vaccine rollout, I'm guessing.
That would explain the casual racism, the forgery, the mindless abuse and the lies.
Wasn't there another one a few weeks back who claimed all BA pilots had died of CV19? As I recall, although I was at work and missed the fun, you all battered that one to a pulp.
Yes there was. Very similar mode of expression too. So similar in fact that ...
I think the time has come for us all to try and strongly persuade those of our friends and family who are vaccine hesitant to get the jab. If not they will be barred from most events and pubs and will struggle to lead a normal life in the UK. They will in effect become societal outcasts. See the speech by the PM of Israel
How much pressure is to be applied to anti-vaxxers will depend very much on the progress of the disease over the next couple of months. If it becomes apparent that existing coverage is sufficient to end the emergency and keep us out of lockdown then nobody will care about the refusers. If it isn't then the public pressure to start stamping on them, and keep doing so until they either accept the jab or are forced into house arrest, will quickly become enormous.
The great mass of the people won't tolerate being immiserated to respect the right of a minority to choose to be difficult.
The refusers are not asking you to care about them. Most are happy to go back to their lives and take any risk that comes.
I know I am.
Its the government that is restricting your liberty, not the unvaccinated.
The risk from refusing the vaccine is not just to yourself. You're a clear and present danger to others.
If you are double vaccinated, as you undoubtedly are, then you risk getting a bad cold from me at worst.
Unless of course you are claiming that the vaccines are not as effective as we are being told.
Hardly a recommendation to get vaccinated.
You have yet to provide a credible reason why you haven't got the vaccine.
By credible, I don't mean a reason that makes sense to other people, I mean one that makes sense to you.
That's a fair point. I don't believe any of the conspiracy theory stuff, but I also know people who have been very off colour after vaccination.
I don't want to go into details because I would be accused of being an anti-vaxxer. But it has occurred to me that acquiring immunity via getting the disease might be been much easier.
I see. Not having it because you're scared of the side effects. I understand that actually. It's odd to voluntarily take something you know will quite possibly make you feel ill for a few days.
I felt exactly that myself and seriously considered skipping it. I had to force myself to do it. Gave myself a talking to and pushed my rational side to the fore. Just like I do when I get on a plane.
So you have not (as yet) managed to push YOUR rational side to the fore on this one - is my conclusion. Would this be a fair way of expressing it?
I have very little scientific knowledge but if I had to be concerned about one vaccine, it would be Moderna. Here, you have a company that was near bankruptcy, found a wonder product that saved it in the form of a Covid vaccine, is using a new type of technology whose trials would normally take a decade but which have been rushed through during the pandemic and has liability waivers in place if anything goes wrong.
"I have very little scientific knowledge but if I had to be concerned about one vaccine, it would be Moderna."
Comments
Cities can bid for individual events.
My own view after 18 months of this is that the only realistic answer to this problem is to do our best to control the virus through vaccinations and occasional circuit breaker style lockdowns; but ultimately to accept that we have to let some people die of Covid; in much the same way as we let some people die on high speed roads; they are both essentially unavoidable facts of life.
Oh good, I think. But no - not per the article. Won't be voting Tory again but won't return to Labour either. He's homeless.
Decent sentiments in the article but a load of confused twaddle really. Sounds like he's now a One Nation Conservative and is (amazingly) surprised that what he voted for in Dec 19 has turned out to be not that.
The plan is failing, of course, because the impossible will always fail. But like every other authoritarian in history, these authoritarians have a scapegoat class handy for them to blame for their failure.
and so Stalin had the Kulaks. They were responsible for socialism's failure in Russia and had to be eliminated.
Mao blamed 'speculators' for the fact that 40m Chinese starved to death between 1958 and 1962 alone.
And of course we know that Jewish people have been variously used as scapegoats by all sorts of authoritarian failures down the centuries.
What we see in the scapegoating of the un-vaxxed an echo of all these tactics. The reason this isn't working is the unvaccinated. If only they were vaccinated everything would be fine.
Of course it wouldn't be, and then another round of culprits has to be blamed for the ongoing problems that are being faced.
The real failure, of course, is in the system the authoritarians are protecting.
--AS
Policy for September is compulsory vaccination for healthworkers who want to stay in their jobs. Already those without a "pass sanitaire" have been banned from events and cafés and restaurants. I think they are or soon will be banned from some shopping centres too. But they are not banned from all shops, and they are not subject to full-scale house arrest.
Incidentally France has a culture and history of "délation" that would make most Daily Express readers look like woke pinko liberals.
‘Barn finds’ are a huge thing in the States, where someone just gets fed up fixing a car and parks it up, only for it to be found by their children several decades later.
There’s one shop I know of in Texas, who have found a nice little sideline to their usual business of working on Jeeps, going round the South buying up barn find E-types, 911s, Sprites etc, for restoration. Awesome to see these old classics get put back on the road.
https://collinsbrosjeep.com/
As we all move over to EV appliances, there’s probably going to be a boom in classic cars. They’re not making any more of them!
It is always a demand problem. It is never, ever, a supplier problem. The NHS never anything but utterly and completely blameless in all of this. Questions about the size, scope, capacity and reach of the health services of the country here or elsewhere are simply not entertained.
I remember suggesting that, instead of spending 400bn on lockdown, we gave an extra 100bn to the health service. This, and all other suggestions for change in the system itself, are dismissed as impossible and completely impractical, now and always.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/atagi-urges-all-sydney-adults-to-consider-astrazeneca-in-updated-advice-20210724-p58cl7.html
The obvious solution is to cut the event significantly in size, but who is going to do the necessary and decide that perhaps half the sports need to get the chop?
It's quite funny how everyone who 2 or 3 weeks was demonising BJ for "reckless reopening" is now demonising BJ for "not opening quickly enough". In BBC speak does that mean it is right because everyone is cross? Quite similar to midges and a camel, perhaps.
--AS
They’ve cut production quite a bit now, and more independent service options are becoming available over time - so they’ll probably be easier to run in future.
I felt exactly that myself and seriously considered skipping it. I had to force myself to do it. Gave myself a talking to and pushed my rational side to the fore. Just like I do when I get on a plane.
So you have not (as yet) managed to push YOUR rational side to the fore on this one - is my conclusion. Would this be a fair way of expressing it?
The fury should more correctly be about people who died unnecessarily.
True, the death camps came later, from 1942, but if you're going to suggest that what's happening now bears the slightest resemblance to the actions of the SA in the early 1930s you should change what you're drinking.
They’ve now got a race against time to get the whole population vaccinated, and are probably going to have severe restrictions until it’s done.
There’s a huge anti-vax movement there to contend with too, at least as bad as in the USA.
X marks the spot.
Oh, hold on, you've already said you can't.
If there is one thing that annoys me more than Contrarian's nasty dishonest bullying hypocrisy, it's people misusing the Holocaust for their own political ends.
They are a subscale OEM without the efficiencies of the production engineering discipline that comes with being part of a larger group and that shows in the quality. They make £200k+ cars with doors that are held together with double sided tape. If an engineer at Porsche proposed that, they'd be taken out the back and shot. They are wracked with reliability issues and the experience you get at the dealers when something does go wrong occupies the zone exactly equidistant between insult and farce.
In all seriousness as a Yorkshireman, I've nothing against any region of the UK, I'm not a snob against London and I think London is great. I just want my own region to have a fair share and I think I should be allowed to think that without it appearing like I want to take something away from London.
Honestly, I didn't have you down as an anti-vaxxer. This is the kind of shite that makes me think the vaccine passport is a good idea and people like you who don't take it should be left out in the cold until you do.
1. It isn't full of effete trendies and bumptious mumsnets.
2. It isn't very good.
In no way does this resemble what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany and it is both offensive and dishonest of you to pretend otherwise. As for your claims that you refuse to prove, that's what doesn't sit well with me. You are trying to guilt trip me into withdrawing my statements that are undercutting your claims. Not going to work, because my statements are based on facts and yours are clearly based on prejudices.
You've been repeatedly challenged to provide a link for a literally incredible statementand have refused to. You've even failed to link to the one thing you've posted that you claim (dubiously) to support you. No 'in time' about it. Put up or shut up.
You have falsified information and now are making actually libellous allegations against me, given I am an historian of the Holocaust. Typical of a coward and a forger.
PROVIDE SOME EVIDENCE OR WITHDRAW YOUR CLAIMS.
https://tinyurl.com/7c2z4s67
That would explain the casual racism, the forgery, the mindless abuse and the lies.
Wasn't there another one a few weeks back who claimed all BA pilots had died of CV19? As I recall, although I was at work and missed the fun, you all battered that one to a pulp.
I'm opposed to compulsion when it comes to medical treatment, including vaccinations, and there are worrying parallels with forced medical treatment in authoritarian regimes, including, say, the forced sterilisations in China as part of the one-child policy. It's possible to oppose forced vaccination, or coerced vaccination, without misusing the holocaust to do so.
But I am amused that such people are viewed as 'typical'.
Leading to the bafflement of such people when they are outvoted by those who live in places which they couldn't find on a map. Pauline Kael's apocryphal quote being a classic example.
But let me reverse your proposition - you think there is something fundamentally right about the person you described. With perhaps some personal yearning involved ? See your previous comments about needing to go to London to have 'power and influence' and to benefit from house price inflation.
Ever heard New Model Army's 'Green and Grey' ?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpV0Ot3EeM
I think there's a little (but only a little, mustn't overdo it) of that in you and me.
And the valleys of green and grey and now filled with new housing estates and country parks.
What a sewer their minds must be
So perhaps there are not as many as I supposed. Someone in medicine might know more ...
That's why he was banned, although he was a useful commentator on American polling.
And, indeed, @Theuniondivvie has proved you are lying. What has been happening instead is that there have been claims that this is like the start of the Holocaust, which understandably upsets Holocaust survivors.
Nobody is dismissing Holocaust survivors - except you. If that upsets you, stop doing it.
Edit - incidentally, if you make a claim that you say is based on evidence, that evidence needs to be provided at once. Not at some unspecified future date. Show some integrity and moral courage, and withdraw your claims. You've clearly looked for evidence and not found it (your unlinked Tweet above proves that) because it isn't there.
Oh, and then go and get vaccinated.
I remember in his History of the Jews, Paul Johnson cited one Egyptian newspaper which argued in the course of one article that (a) the Holocaust never happened , but (b) if it had, it was a good thing and (c) was orchestrated by Zionists in collaboration iwth the Nazis.
Apparently not understanding that actually, they were resettlement grants for survivors - which would rather tend to confirm how few survivors there were...
If nothing else, s/he should be banned for calling everyone 'mate'.
https://apnews.com/article/race-and-ethnicity-italy-media-social-media-coronavirus-pandemic-be1624ca81cc4e8231b0a3dca25b68c6
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/holocaust-survivor-96-coronavirus-jab-23403144
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/04/nyregion/coronavirus-holocaust-survivor-vaccine.html
I can't find anything on the web about holocaust survivors comparing Covid vaccination to the Nazis, or the holocaust, but lots about them opposing such comparisons, or receiving anti-semitic abuse for supporting Covid vaccination.
That's rather artful. But to what end?