Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Let me have men about me that are fat mediocre centrists and such as sleep-a-nights. Yond Leon has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
Just thinking about minor aspects of the pandemic - the madness of it all - washing your hands as you sing Happy Birthday - the supermarkets with arrow signs down the aisles - the ludicrous saucepan banging to save the fucking NHS - makes me feel simultaneously bewildered, disbelieving, and mutinous, with a side order of suicidal bleakness, as I remember how sad and alone I was in lockdown 3
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
Just thinking about minor aspects of the pandemic - the madness of it all - washing your hands as you sing Happy Birthday - the supermarkets with arrow signs down the aisles - the ludicrous saucepan banging to save the fucking NHS - makes me feel simultaneously bewildered, disbelieving, and mutinous, with a side order of suicidal bleakness, as I remember how sad and alone I was in lockdown 3
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
Streeting would have done well in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, probably closer to the con side than the LDs though. He is a pretty typical centrist who could have been in any of the parties, not through ambition but because he is more focused on delivery than principle. Unpopular on here, but effective in real life.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Boris now hates Farage after his attacks on the Boris wave and COVID lockdowns so great for Kemi to have Boris in her corner with Cleverly against Farage and Jenrick
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
Streeting would have done well in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, probably closer to the con side than the LDs though. He is a pretty typical centrist who could have been in any of the parties, not through ambition but because he is more focused on delivery than principle. Unpopular on here, but effective in real life.
This is why I can see Streeting flouncing. Delivery, not ideology.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
It could also be because they haven't committed indictable crimes, or they can't be proved to have done so beyond reasonable doubt?
I hated the COVID lockdowns myself and knew they would be disastrous, and not necessarily stop the pandemic spreading at all, though they could have slowed it by a few days. But locking people up just because you disagree with them is wrong and a dangerous precedent anyway, no matter how satisfying. COVID measures were implemented by Parliament, with no more than the usual amount of official lying that accompanies anything the government really wants to do, and had overwhelming public support.
Indeed many wanted COVID measures to be much harsher. So in a way, we have to admire the government's restraint - unlike if the current cretins had been in charge.
Indeed. It’s an unpopular opinion, but having someone like Boris as PM, whose instinct was to keep freedoms, and someone like Cummings next to him, who understood the need for accurate data and computer modelling, were big positives for the country.
The current lot would have been considerably worse.
Not necessarily.
Boris was keen on freedom, sure.
But the consequence of that was his failure to apply the brakes when the lights turned amber. So when they turned red a few days later (which they were always likely to) we ended up with the emergency stop of lockdowns.
Sometimes, wanting something is what stops you having it.
The duality of two letters Boris always meant he was lurching between conflicting instincts, or the last person he talked to. It might be said that the UK would have done better during Covid if they had been led by someone more consistent whatever their position was on lockdowns etc.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Boris was never going to join Reform - he's always been a Conservative - whether he's a liberal conservative or a fan of Thatcherism on steroids depends on which audience he's talking to at any given point. That he continues to inspire a dwindling ban of fanatical adherents is undeniable.
His personal tragedy (and I have some sympathy) is that having schemed and manoeuvred his way for nearly 20 years to become Conservative leader and then having won the most convincing Conservative election victory since Thatcher in December 2019, with the political world at his feet, he found the job he always coveted wasn't what he thought it would be.
Instead of being "cheerleader in chief" for a new, optimistic, positive, post-EU Britain, he found himself having to apply the most rigid control on the population since his idol, Winston Churchill, in the dark days of 1940, with the Wehrmacht in Calais and Western Europe on the cusp of falling under Nazi rule.
This wasn't an army but a virus but the net effect was the same - Boris was forced to govern in a tone which was the very antithesis of what he wanted or imagined and it didn't suit him in the way it might have suited a Theresa May or a Keir Starmer.
The big difference between COVID and other public health emergencies was the conscious decision (after a few false starts) to prioritise health over wealth. The public health of the population was deemed more important then the health of the economy or the public finances - rightly or wrongly, that was what happened.
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Boris now hates Farage after his attacks on the Boris wave and COVID lockdowns so great for Kemi to have Boris in her corner with Cleverly against Farage and Jenrick
Actually in his article it is the pro Putin aspect of Farage that really angers him, which to be fair to Boris he was 100% pro Ukraine anti Russia from day one
I am sure the other issues contribute but it is clear he is not going to help Reform and will call them out
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
As a matter of interest how would he do that ?
As an aside, I do not expect Streeting to be sacked
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
NHS waiting lists are falling and the Health Secretary has one of the Cabinet's success stories. Even if he is nakedly ambitious, he is not openly criticising the government or his Cabinet colleagues. Wes Streeting is no Robert Jenrick.
Both Jenrick and Streeting are Cambridge graduates and thus fail my Oxford test for betting on future prime ministers.
Andy Burnham also a Cambridge graduate, Farage never went to university, Badenoch went to Sussex, Polanski went to Aberystwyth. Even Starmer went to Leeds and just did a Masters at Oxford. Indeed only Davey has an Oxford BA of the main party leaders now
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The mistake was not seeing it as an engineering problem.
you like a good batshit conspiracy theory leon, what do you make of the sasha riley recordings?
Was searching for some background on Two-Tone and came across this rather sad story. Seems these groups have been around for ages without any significant attempt to root out the perpetrators. Would bet there are a lot of names in the Epstein files getting protected.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The mistake was not seeing it as an engineering problem.
it was a public health problem, much more complicated
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
I understand Trump is repositioning one of his aircraft carriers to the area
That may be defensive, but it could also indicate plans to take on the Iranian regime
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
That's very good to be fair
Helps when you have two such easy targets as Boris and Jenrick.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
Indeed. However, the takeaway is not the political and personal hypocrisy - that's a given - but the fact that, so far, not a single Tory big beast has come out for Reform.
Imagine a world in which Major, Clarke, May, Cameron, Gove, Boris, Hammond, Rishi, Heseltine, or any two them had denounced the Tories and come out for Reform. Things would look very different.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
Here:
That’s a very cool map, well done for finding.
Am I correct to say that all the ones marked "Cession" were won in wars that the USA fomented for the purpose.
(That's true of annexing part of Mexico to be part of California, and the late 19C War where the USA occupied Cuba. I'm not sure about the Spanish War of 1819.)
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
Machado may be the staunchest advocate for peace there ever was (though I'm unsure what the eveidence is to support that), but she's pretty shit at the optics thing.
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
I understand Trump is repositioning one of his aircraft carriers to the area
That may be defensive, but it could also indicate plans to take on the Iranian regime
There are also repositioning of air support vehicles in Europe, support activities for b2 operations from Diego Garcia, and special ops reportedly being relocated to Europe.
Reza Pahlavi is still encouraging Iranians to the streets, and Trump’s red line has been very clearly crossed. He might be many things but what he himself is certain of, is that he is not Barack Obama.
In the background, the analysts will be pitching this as now or never. They are desperate to clean up the global board as much as possible, in anticipation of a possible great power struggle with China in 2027.
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
The moment has passed in Iran - had Trump not been so preoccupied with his antics in Venezuela, he might have been able to instigate some precision strikes which might have tipped the balance in favour of the protesters but the protests appear to be reducing as the families bury the dead.
The other issue is what follows the theocracy? I don't know how much support Pahlavi really has - it's impossible to know - and all he's ever said is he sees himself as a transitional figure so what or who follows the mullahs?
Nobody, I suspect, wants a destabilised Iran riven with anarchy and close to open civil war. We know groups at the edges might seek to break from the current state and we have no clue how Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq and others will react to a change in the Government in Tehran.
As to public reaction in the event of a co-ordinated attempt to remove the theocrats, it would be interesting to see people dancing on the head of the pin condemning Washington while trying not to support the mullahs but there are wider questions than domestic British political opinion and whether the "right" enjoy the disomfort of the "left" or whether those slavishly loyal to whatever Washington says and does will or would support civilian deaths (accidental).
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
As a matter of interest how would he do that ?
As an aside, I do not expect Streeting to be sacked
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
The moment has passed in Iran - had Trump not been so preoccupied with his antics in Venezuela, he might have been able to instigate some precision strikes which might have tipped the balance in favour of the protesters but the protests appear to be reducing as the families bury the dead.
The other issue is what follows the theocracy? I don't know how much support Pahlavi really has - it's impossible to know - and all he's ever said is he sees himself as a transitional figure so what or who follows the mullahs?
Nobody, I suspect, wants a destabilised Iran riven with anarchy and close to open civil war. We know groups at the edges might seek to break from the current state and we have no clue how Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq and others will react to a change in the Government in Tehran.
As to public reaction in the event of a co-ordinated attempt to remove the theocrats, it would be interesting to see people dancing on the head of the pin condemning Washington while trying not to support the mullahs but there are wider questions than domestic British political opinion and whether the "right" enjoy the disomfort of the "left" or whether those slavishly loyal to whatever Washington says and does will or would support civilian deaths (accidental).
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
Indeed. However, the takeaway is not the political and personal hypocrisy - that's a given - but the fact that, so far, not a single Tory big beast has come out for Reform.
Imagine a world in which Major, Clarke, May, Cameron, Gove, Boris, Hammond, Rishi, Heseltine, or any two them had denounced the Tories and come out for Reform. Things would look very different.
Bizarre perspective. The cast list above are most of what your average Reform voter would see as wrong with the Tory party. You might as well say that Reform are going nowhere because Rory Stewart or John Bercow hasn’t come out for them.
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
Streeting would have done well in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government, probably closer to the con side than the LDs though. He is a pretty typical centrist who could have been in any of the parties, not through ambition but because he is more focused on delivery than principle. Unpopular on here, but effective in real life.
Am fascinated how little attention the build up of military resources in the gulf is getting here and among wider society. Looks absolutely locked on to me that we’re about to see a regime change war. This time in 2003 there were millions on the streets and it utterly dominated public and private discourse for half a year before it started.
I understand Trump is repositioning one of his aircraft carriers to the area
That may be defensive, but it could also indicate plans to take on the Iranian regime
I think the problem has been that there weren't significant Yank resources in the Middle East, because Trump sent them all to the Caribbean.
Europe, by comparison, does have naval resources there, but Europe has nearly twice as many escort-type vessels than the USN, and the USN ones have to cover worldwide and escort all their carrier groups.
But the Houthis are on ceasefire, and the Suez Canal route is in the process of probably reopening (2 carrier groups). Maersk sent a USA flagged ship through there recently, which is the first time for two years.
What's Going on with Shipping had videos about those recently:
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
In return for which they promised by treaty to acknowledge Denmark's control of Greenland.
Of course, but now theyre back waving their cash and saying fancy selling ?
The purchase seems wired to us but maybe less so to them.
Extortion is extortion, and Denmark is a treaty ally.
"They" is the President, and without explicit Congressional authorisation, it's completely outside of his powers, and also in breach of international treaty ratified by Congress, and therefore illegal under US domestic law.
But by all means, carry on pretending it's normal.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The engineering problem is interesting; the political issues less so. If the purpose of an inquiry is to explore how best to protect us from a future pandemic by identifying what went wrong and what went gangbusters (in the argot of the times) then months of barristers poring over emails will not help. Maybe Chris Whitty was wrong about everything; or perhaps Matt Hancock was so far out of his depth that you cannot even blame him for being wrong. It doesn't matter. The individual decision makers last time have already been replaced. It will be a different lot next time.
Exercise Cygnus in 2016 modelled a pandemic. Many of its conclusions were not acted upon. The Covid pandemic was Cygnus on steroids and its lessons too will be ignored while the inquiry drones on about civil service email exchanges and alt-right pundits wonder about blaming Biden or Fauci or whether it was a bat in the market or a bat in the lab or whether the bat in the market was the bat in the lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
Where, next time, will we find hospital beds, PPE, drugs and vaccines? Can we store them, buy them or make them? What behaviour changes will be needed? Will we have better modelling software? Do we need test and trace and if so, can we separate them? Can there be scientists on call to rapidly test assumptions (eg we got everything about droplets wrong last time because the textbooks were wrong).
On the Blair appointment, trying to be fair here, given it has been a long time since he held public office, does he still have the skills or knowledge to be useful in such a role? He has what I'm told is a consequential think tank, if there is such a thing, and he was special envoy in and around the region a decade and more ago, is any of that genuinely helpful here or do they just need figures of general recognition who are the right sort of chaps?
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way. Transport accident investigations don’t have everyone turning up with barristers, they just agree to tell the truth even if they screwed up, knowing that there’s no personal repercussions for their testimony.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
I've not read it, but I would hope that any recommendations will not assume that everyone involved at the time should have done everything perfectly and make no allowance for the unprecedentedness of it all, whilst highlighting institutional and organisational lessons which would instead minimise risks and mitigate the possibility of personal failings.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The engineering problem is interesting; the political issues less so. If the purpose of an inquiry is to explore how best to protect us from a future pandemic by identifying what went wrong and what went gangbusters (in the argot of the times) then months of barristers poring over emails will not help. Maybe Chris Whitty was wrong about everything; or perhaps Matt Hancock was so far out of his depth that you cannot even blame him for being wrong. It doesn't matter. The individual decision makers last time have already been replaced. It will be a different lot next time.
Exercise Cygnus in 2016 modelled a pandemic. Many of its conclusions were not acted upon. The Covid pandemic was Cygnus on steroids and its lessons too will be ignored while the inquiry drones on about civil service email exchanges and alt-right pundits wonder about blaming Biden or Fauci or whether it was a bat in the market or a bat in the lab or whether the bat in the market was the bat in the lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
Where, next time, will we find hospital beds, PPE, drugs and vaccines? Can we store them, buy them or make them? What behaviour changes will be needed? Will we have better modelling software? Do we need test and trace and if so, can we separate them? Can there be scientists on call to rapidly test assumptions (eg we got everything about droplets wrong last time because the textbooks were wrong).
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
Yes, while Badenoch sacking Jenrick just confirmed his move to Reform, Starmer sacking Streeting is not going to send him to the Liberal Democrats. Streeting is ambitious to be PM and if Starmer sacked him he would then launch a leadership challenge to Sir Keir
As a matter of interest how would he do that ?
As an aside, I do not expect Streeting to be sacked
81 MPs to sign up for him and off we go. Contest.
Maybe just a third of those currently expecting to lose their seat next time out...
The Wire is one of those shows which was super highly acclaimed and still highly regarded, yet I've not had any desire to actually go back and rewatch it since it ended, despite rewatching many 'lesser' shows. I don't even see it talked about as much as, say, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, so I wonder how much cultural staying power it will have.
The Wire is one of those shows which was super highly acclaimed and still highly regarded, yet I've not had any desire to actually go back and rewatch it since it ended, despite rewatching many 'lesser' shows. I don't even see it talked about as much as, say, Breaking Bad or The Sopranos, so I wonder how much cultural staying power it will have.
Its a harder watch than Breaking Bad and fewer moments that aren't dark so even though it is at least as good, it probably is less good to re-watch.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
Hard to imagine the USA without the agricultural powerhouse of the Mississipi Basin and the central states.
Granted, it is in part because it is so big, but I remember a meme about how the USA always seems to find itself with all the great resources it needs, like they discover oil or rare earths whenever they want it (the latter may be less true, IDK), as though they were playing Civililization on easy mode.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
Indeed. However, the takeaway is not the political and personal hypocrisy - that's a given - but the fact that, so far, not a single Tory big beast has come out for Reform.
Imagine a world in which Major, Clarke, May, Cameron, Gove, Boris, Hammond, Rishi, Heseltine, or any two them had denounced the Tories and come out for Reform. Things would look very different.
Bizarre perspective. The cast list above are most of what your average Reform voter would see as wrong with the Tory party. You might as well say that Reform are going nowhere because Rory Stewart or John Bercow hasn’t come out for them.
If you seriously believe that Reform would not be triumphant about a truly big beast of Toryism who repented and paid homage to the truth of Reform I have a bridge to sell you.
Look at the noise they made about a non big beast, careless about £5,000,000 owed to HMRC, ex Tory CoE just this week.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The engineering problem is interesting; the political issues less so. If the purpose of an inquiry is to explore how best to protect us from a future pandemic by identifying what went wrong and what went gangbusters (in the argot of the times) then months of barristers poring over emails will not help. Maybe Chris Whitty was wrong about everything; or perhaps Matt Hancock was so far out of his depth that you cannot even blame him for being wrong. It doesn't matter. The individual decision makers last time have already been replaced. It will be a different lot next time.
Exercise Cygnus in 2016 modelled a pandemic. Many of its conclusions were not acted upon. The Covid pandemic was Cygnus on steroids and its lessons too will be ignored while the inquiry drones on about civil service email exchanges and alt-right pundits wonder about blaming Biden or Fauci or whether it was a bat in the market or a bat in the lab or whether the bat in the market was the bat in the lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
Where, next time, will we find hospital beds, PPE, drugs and vaccines? Can we store them, buy them or make them? What behaviour changes will be needed? Will we have better modelling software? Do we need test and trace and if so, can we separate them? Can there be scientists on call to rapidly test assumptions (eg we got everything about droplets wrong last time because the textbooks were wrong).
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
You make it sound as though the Trump crowd are capable of rational analysys. Just as likely that some old investor buddy of Trump mentioned in an aside that there's some money to be made out of Greenland. The rest follows...
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
Out of nowhere was clearly hyperbolic not a literal statement, we know he has brought it up before albeit he's ramped it up now, it clearly has not been a priority until this presidential term.
And your analysis still makes no sense since it has been pointed out the USA realistically has the right to do whatever it wants in Greenland anyway, so the acquisitiveness angle alienating allies undermines efforts to deal with China. It's not like the US's stronger allies are suddenly going to pal up to China and they cannot just pull away entirely, but co-operation and such assistance as they need will, in the decades to come, be trickier than they would have been if they'd not started threatening to invade close allies.
If you can secure your aims (viz a viz defence of Greenland) without alienating allies yet you choose to do so anyway, that's a weird choice. That'd be like me threatening to mug a relative for money when they were willing to give me whatever I wanted anyway - my other relatives will take note next I come asking.
(Yes, geopolitics is more complex than a family analogy).
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
Out of nowhere was clearly hyperbolic not a literal statement, we know he has brought it up before albeit he's ramped it up now, it clearly has not been a priority until this presidential term.
And your analysis still makes no sense since it has been pointed out the USA realistically has the right to do whatever it wants in Greenland anyway, so the acquisitiveness angle alienating allies undermines efforts to deal with China. It's not like the US's stronger allies are suddenly going to pal up to China and they cannot just pull away entirely, but co-operation and such assistance as they need will, in the decades to come, be trickier than they would have been if they'd not started threatening to invade close allies.
If you can secure your aims (viz a viz defence of Greenland) without alienating allies yet you choose to do so anyway, that's a weird choice. That'd be like me threatening to mug a relative for money when they were willing to give me whatever I wanted anyway - my other relatives will take note next I come asking.
(Yes, geopolitics is more complex than a family analogy).
My sister has a house in the Lake District that I'm welcome to stay in whenever I want, and indeed she likes having me stay there to deter potential squatters. I haven't been staying there so much recently but that's been my own decision. I think I'm going to demand she transfers ownership of the house to me.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
I do think we're in a dangerous moment re Greenland. Initially there was some american commentary about how it wasn't really about taking it over, this was another of those 'Trump threatens people with X as he wants them to do Y' situations, but already there seems to be more 'You know, it's blunt, but he is right that it is necessary for America', so I think mentally they are preparing to switch to full throated support of the President, despite a few GOP initially coming out as skeptical and polls not being fantastic about it.
And since Denmark wouldn't have stood in the way of anything short of annexation, what more can they offer to get him to drop it? The threat of the end of NATO, which Trump thinks is just a drain on America? It's why it has to be genuinely desired, since there doesn't seem to be any other concessions that Trump can extract as the hidden 'real' motive.
I do think we're in a dangerous moment re Greenland. Initially there was some american commentary about how it wasn't really about taking it over, this was another of those 'Trump threatens people with X as he wants them to do Y' situations, but already there seems to be more 'You know, it's blunt, but he is right that it is necessary for America', so I think mentally they are preparing to switch to full throated support of the President, despite a few GOP initially coming out as skeptical and polls not being fantastic about it.
And since Denmark wouldn't have stood in the way of anything short of annexation, what more can they offer to get him to drop it? The threat of the end of NATO, which Trump thinks is just a drain on America?
We have to think of this as an opportunity, not a threat. So many people willing to be slowly boiled like a frog in a pan, no single incident ramping up the temperature quite enough to provoke them into jumping. Well, this is the moment. Directly threatening invasion of a NATO ally's territory, the ally that bore the highest cost for answering the USA's call under Article 5. This is a gift for those leaders who don't know when it is they should properly commit to democratic values, universal human rights and the rule of law. Trump is making it easy for you: this is the time.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
You make it sound as though the Trump crowd are capable of rational analysys. Just as likely that some old investor buddy of Trump mentioned in an aside that there's some money to be made out of Greenland. The rest follows...
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
I think the country will have turned a corner if (when?) we are finally willing to confront Covid, lockdown and its legacy.
There has been a frightening lack of insight or debate on the economic and fiscal policies, in particular, which underpin a number of the challenges we face now. All too often I fear this is because they were enabled by an unquestioning mainstream media who consistently sided with a more restrictions/more support mindset throughout the pandemic.
And there is a wide spectrum of views on this - those who make it a binary issue are entirely undermining their case because those opposing any sort of restrictions in spring 2020, or facemasks at all, are as batshit insane as those who wanted to permanently close nightclubs.
The conceited right wing pricks on here who are angry about lockdowns, etc. are really just angry at themselves. They barricaded themselves into their houses for months on end just because utter fucking charlatans and liars like Johnson and Hancock told them to.
No, many of us completely ignored the "regulations" and restrictions because we saw them for what they were..💩 It was just baffling to me how so many (particularly those on the right) who profess to loving freedom just went along with it all..🧐
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
I think the country will have turned a corner if (when?) we are finally willing to confront Covid, lockdown and its legacy.
There has been a frightening lack of insight or debate on the economic and fiscal policies, in particular, which underpin a number of the challenges we face now. All too often I fear this is because they were enabled by an unquestioning mainstream media who consistently sided with a more restrictions/more support mindset throughout the pandemic.
And there is a wide spectrum of views on this - those who make it a binary issue are entirely undermining their case because those opposing any sort of restrictions in spring 2020, or facemasks at all, are as batshit insane as those who wanted to permanently close nightclubs.
The conceited right wing pricks on here who are angry about lockdowns, etc. are really just angry at themselves. They barricaded themselves into their houses for months on end just because utter fucking charlatans and liars like Johnson and Hancock told them to.
No, many of us completely ignored the "regulations" and restrictions because we saw them for what they were..💩 It was just baffling to me how so many (particularly those on the right) who profess to loving freedom just went along with it all..🧐
Pretty sure there was an exemption for recognised medical conditions, including "being an edgelord"
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They prefer Russia as an ally. Similar style of government after all, and a fellow megalomaniac leader without any moral compass.
That is enough five years before I can apply for an ESTA.....
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
But if he did that other MPs joining Reform would have to do the same and that would seriously reduce the chances of further defections so you can see why Farage wouldn't like the idea.
If you want a reckoning around COVID-19, I recommend you read the latest COVID-19 Inquiry report. It lays out events, how decisions were made, in detail, with evidence. Your tax money paid for it, you might as well read it!
Very typical of these sort of things, it’s a very expensive way of analysing what happened in the worst possible way.
Let’s hope the next chapter is better, at looking forward to how government might better deal with the next massive national emergency.
Johnson set the terms of the inquiry and he set them to examine decision making during COVID, so that’s what it’s been doing.
Oh indeed, I just think it’s totally the wrong approach.
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
you're trying to apply an engineering approach to an non engineering problem
The engineering problem is interesting; the political issues less so. If the purpose of an inquiry is to explore how best to protect us from a future pandemic by identifying what went wrong and what went gangbusters (in the argot of the times) then months of barristers poring over emails will not help. Maybe Chris Whitty was wrong about everything; or perhaps Matt Hancock was so far out of his depth that you cannot even blame him for being wrong. It doesn't matter. The individual decision makers last time have already been replaced. It will be a different lot next time.
Exercise Cygnus in 2016 modelled a pandemic. Many of its conclusions were not acted upon. The Covid pandemic was Cygnus on steroids and its lessons too will be ignored while the inquiry drones on about civil service email exchanges and alt-right pundits wonder about blaming Biden or Fauci or whether it was a bat in the market or a bat in the lab or whether the bat in the market was the bat in the lab. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
Where, next time, will we find hospital beds, PPE, drugs and vaccines? Can we store them, buy them or make them? What behaviour changes will be needed? Will we have better modelling software? Do we need test and trace and if so, can we separate them? Can there be scientists on call to rapidly test assumptions (eg we got everything about droplets wrong last time because the textbooks were wrong).
As a really obvious example, medical gowns. Should we now be buying them, storing them, and using the bottom of the stored pile, with a year’s supply in the store? Do we have companies in the UK with whom we can contract to make more of them in an emergency, and do they have access to stockpiles of the raw materials required?
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
Sets a precedent for any future Con-Refukker defections though.
I don't think it was necessary or an outrage he hasn't, but has Farage given an actual explanation why UKIP did it, but Reform are not?
The main reason may be they anticipate more defections, plus they genuinely have a shot at real power now so no need for such games, but has that specific question been put to him?
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
But if he did that other MPs joining Reform would have to do the same and that would seriously reduce the chances of further defections so you can see why Farage wouldn't like the idea.
Douglas Carswell was correct on the point of principle.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They’re trying, in a slightly weird way, to get everyone else ready.
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They’re trying, in a slightly weird way, to get everyone else ready.
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They’re trying, in a slightly weird way, to get everyone else ready.
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
If China does go for Taiwan there's going to be a very, very bloody mess on the Taiwanese beaches. And elsewhere in Taiwan, even though the majority of the population is now ethnically Chinese, not Taiwanese. I assume that the Danes (etc) having seen what happened in Caracas are now ready to defend Nuuk again the sort of 'American Commando' attack we saw there.
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They’re trying, in a slightly weird way, to get everyone else ready.
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
No, Trump just wants to have Greenland.
Greenland is a rehash from the 1950s when his political ideas were on trend and formed. Nothing to do with China.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
"Centrist" in the context it's used on here doesn't mean the sensible balanced dead-centre of where public opinion sits, it means they are defenders of the existing liberal consensus, socially liberal (usually very) and economically centrist, although more often than not centre-left because they tend to be middle-class educated professionals who have some assets and equity and an interest in or reliance on the State.
I'd say that's attractive to 15-20% of the electorate, not 99%, but due to the demographic on pb.com they are heavily overrepresented on here - and consistently confused as to why the sands are shifting beneath them.
On the uselessness of local councils, and why they don't deserve any more money - a tale of my local one.
In town, we have a traffic problem. An A road ends on a roundabout where it meets another A road (3 exits). The whole lot is always stationary at peak times, which then backs up the rest of town. Except, if you actually drive through it every day, one quickly realises that the queues aren't caused by the roundabout at-all, but by a really busy pedestrian crossing about 100 yards after the busiest exit, the queues from which keep the roundabout blocked. Inevitably, when travelling in either direction you queue to these lights, then it's moving traffic beyond.
Anyway, my local council is currently running sponsored posts on Facebook to get people to fill in a survey about possible improvements to this junction, as they've finally noticed that the traffic is terrible and air quality poor (it's been like it for years, although it's steadily got worse because of massively excessive house building for the available infrastructure, which has increased traffic levels noticeably).
The key survey question (after figuring out where you live and how you use the junction) asks to you to indicate if you think that any of the following would help: -introducing traffic signals -improving pedestrian crossings -adding cycle lanes or facilities -widening pavements -better signage and wayfinding -improved lighting -features to increase accessibility
All of these, with one possible exception, will at best do nothing, and in all probability will make the traffic and air quality problems worse.
The possible exception is if by "improving pedestrian crossings" they can find a way to close the problematic one, and replace it with a overbridge (not trivial, but the geography makes it a less ridiculous idea than it might sound). But I'm pretty sure that's not in their plan.
Not on the list is the solution that most people want - a mile long bypass over very straightforward terrain, which would take a huge volume of traffic out of town completely, including thousands of lorries a day, but which the council is refusing to contemplate, even as an unfunded long-term aspiration.
Meanwhile, their short term aspirations include (against huge local opposition*) letting developers build 700 more homes in a location where the residents will need to use the congested road and junction for almost any journey anywhere.
I've seen this so many times before. We'll end up with a load of public money wasted, and the junction worse than before. If anyone tells you councils haven't got enough money, they are lying, all the while they are also still doing stuff like this.
*I'm not a NIMBY, or even anywhere near one. But I can see our town has been wrecked by being allowed to grow 20% in size over 15 years without a single peices of corresponding infrastructure being put in place. I'm fine with building - but only if it comes with everything else it needs to support it.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
Just thinking about minor aspects of the pandemic - the madness of it all - washing your hands as you sing Happy Birthday - the supermarkets with arrow signs down the aisles - the ludicrous saucepan banging to save the fucking NHS - makes me feel simultaneously bewildered, disbelieving, and mutinous, with a side order of suicidal bleakness, as I remember how sad and alone I was in lockdown 3
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
I think the country will have turned a corner if (when?) we are finally willing to confront Covid, lockdown and its legacy.
There has been a frightening lack of insight or debate on the economic and fiscal policies, in particular, which underpin a number of the challenges we face now. All too often I fear this is because they were enabled by an unquestioning mainstream media who consistently sided with a more restrictions/more support mindset throughout the pandemic.
And there is a wide spectrum of views on this - those who make it a binary issue are entirely undermining their case because those opposing any sort of restrictions in spring 2020, or facemasks at all, are as batshit insane as those who wanted to permanently close nightclubs.
The conceited right wing pricks on here who are angry about lockdowns, etc. are really just angry at themselves. They barricaded themselves into their houses for months on end just because utter fucking charlatans and liars like Johnson and Hancock told them to.
No, we all had neighbours who simply revelled at the chance to be official busybodies and grasses on their street and absolutely fucking enjoyed every minute of it too.
It's a salutatory lesson as to what would have happened if Britain had ever been under occupation by the Nazis; collaboration would have been absolutely rife.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
It could also be because they haven't committed indictable crimes, or they can't be proved to have done so beyond reasonable doubt?
I hated the COVID lockdowns myself and knew they would be disastrous, and not necessarily stop the pandemic spreading at all, though they could have slowed it by a few days. But locking people up just because you disagree with them is wrong and a dangerous precedent anyway, no matter how satisfying. COVID measures were implemented by Parliament, with no more than the usual amount of official lying that accompanies anything the government really wants to do, and had overwhelming public support.
Indeed many wanted COVID measures to be much harsher. So in a way, we have to admire the government's restraint - unlike if the current cretins had been in charge.
Indeed. It’s an unpopular opinion, but having someone like Boris as PM, whose instinct was to keep freedoms, and someone like Cummings next to him, who understood the need for accurate data and computer modelling, were big positives for the country.
The current lot would have been considerably worse.
Yes.
I think under any other PM than Boris, Covid would have been much worse.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
Just thinking about minor aspects of the pandemic - the madness of it all - washing your hands as you sing Happy Birthday - the supermarkets with arrow signs down the aisles - the ludicrous saucepan banging to save the fucking NHS - makes me feel simultaneously bewildered, disbelieving, and mutinous, with a side order of suicidal bleakness, as I remember how sad and alone I was in lockdown 3
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
However probably about 25% of the USA was purchased from someone else.
Louisiana purchase in 1803 from France and Alaska in 1867 from Russia
The USA's last purchase was the Virgin Islands in 1917 from their old friends Denmark.
The desire to purchase is not what is that weird, it's the obsessive urgent tone about it out of nowhere, even to the point of militarily threatening close allies (there can be no other reasonable description of it) about it which is weird.
It’s not out of no where. You just haven’t been paying attention. Further, the swiftness with which this US admin has been moving on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Venezuela and Iran, gives a rather foreboding feeling about their risk assessment of China.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
If the US genuinely expect a major confrontation with China why are they doing so much to lose allies in advance of that confrontation?
They’re trying, in a slightly weird way, to get everyone else ready.
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
It won't, at most there might be sanctions on China but the US and western nations would only go to war with China to defend Japan or South Korea not Taiwan which is a nation created by the losing side in the Chinese civil war.
Trump is more interested in his tariff war with China than a miliitary one
With regards to Starmer and his purported poor friends and advisors, its hard to advise someone to be decisive and strong if they are not. And I think there is plentiful evidence that Starmer doesn't really have a vision beyond "lets get more people able to see a GP".
This isn't unique to him. Sunak's vision for the country was to possess a Green Card for somewhere else. Truss's was to destroy everything and rebuild in her image to be Ice Queen, Boris wanted to be World King but had no idea what that meant, May just wanted to make the Brexit thing work.
We haven't had a leader with a vision since Cameron. And before him Blair, Thatcher, Macmillan, Attlee. They don't come along very often.
Cameron's vision to unite the Conservative Party. Very admirable, but it didn't work out so well.
I think Ted definitely had a vision which was Eurofederalism, and might have worked if it hadn't been for Cameron saving the Conservative Party from itself.
And how dare you miss out Harold (W). Harold's vision was to keep Butskellism running forever, and to my mind that was desirable and laudable.
Even Ken Clarke thought Ted Heath was a fanatic.
He thought nation states had ceased to have relevance; forget a federal Europe - he'd have favoured an entirely unitary one.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
You’ve hit the nail on the head - the people who so easily dismiss as “centrist” everyone from socialists like owls and Palmer through hard core Tories like Casino and HY, not to mention our bonnie cadre of Scots Nats, have simply thrown themselves out of the Overton window and are then observing, from their position squished on the gravel driveway of reality, that everyone else seems to be still upstairs.
It would be great to define "centrism" though, and get some polling to work out what topics are included. I guess it would be something that enjoys perhaps 60 - 70% support, but there are significant fringes that are opposed. Using this, Claude gives me:
Increasing number of foreign students
Current levels of skilled immigration
Full staffing the NHS even if it means more immigration
Assisted dying
Closer ties with the EU
The Monarchy
But not included is
Increase bus services (80% support)
Clean rivers (90)
Increase investment in Renewables (over 80)
Rejoin the EU (50)
National Service (28)
Jail Chris Whitty (I would guess less than 5)
The Boriswave (less than 5)
That would absolutely not enjoy 60-70% support.
"Centrist" is said more in hope than reality; most people do not favour liberal internationalism and open borders.
Boris Johnson holds nothing back in attacking 'narcissistic defections and praising Kemi Badenoch [daily mail]
Any hope by the Boris disciples now in Reform of him joining them is for the birds
Good to see a former PM call out the err, narcissistic, opportunistic, disloyal, nakedly ambitious, good at public speaking and drawing attention without any substance or delivery types who somehow rise to the top despite many obvious flaws.
Indeed. However, the takeaway is not the political and personal hypocrisy - that's a given - but the fact that, so far, not a single Tory big beast has come out for Reform.
Imagine a world in which Major, Clarke, May, Cameron, Gove, Boris, Hammond, Rishi, Heseltine, or any two them had denounced the Tories and come out for Reform. Things would look very different.
Bizarre perspective. The cast list above are most of what your average Reform voter would see as wrong with the Tory party. You might as well say that Reform are going nowhere because Rory Stewart or John Bercow hasn’t come out for them.
Indeed, none of that list would go Reform and Stewart, Clarke and Heseltine would go LD over Reform.
John Redwood of the big beasts is probably the likeliest to go Reform followed by IDS but both of them like Kemi so aren't going anywhere for now.
The only remaining Tory I think is more likely than not to go Reform is Braverman, even Francois has now said Jenrick was wrong and a traitor to his former supporters and he ran Jenrick's leadership campaign
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
You’ve hit the nail on the head - the people who so easily dismiss as “centrist” everyone from socialists like owls and Palmer through hard core Tories like Casino and HY, not to mention our bonnie cadre of Scots Nats, have simply thrown themselves out of the Overton window and are then observing, from their position squished on the gravel driveway of reality, that everyone else seems to be still upstairs.
And, yet, we're far closer to the centre of the Overton window than you are.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
But I don’t think even that’s true. Huge numbers of people are very angry about lockdowns and masks and the rest. So yeah I think far more than 1% of the country would like to see the scientists responsible in jail
Likewise, Vance was part of the Lancet/Fauci cover-up of potential lab leak. The attempt to gaslight us all into thinking that was a “racist conspiracy theory”
He should be in a supermax jail in Nevada
Agreed. That certain key individuals have not faced justice can only really be that everyone has Covid ptsd and wants to forget it. Trillions of dollars of economic damage, millions of early deaths.
The easiest thing psychologically (and hence politically) is to just accept that it was no one’s fault it started, blame those who were anti lockdown for making things worse and move on with your life.
Yup. Exactly
I feel it myself. The anger has ebbed. Not because the injustice was in fact modest, it was catastrophic and Satanic
I just can’t bear thinking about the pandemic. Worst time of my life. Move on
I'm still very angry about it - particularly the lack of respect shown to young people. I still vividly recall the Radio Scotland phone-in where pensioners wanted young people to be banned from going out so they could safely go to the pub. Absolute *****. The lack of personal responsibility too - depending entirely on lockdowns rather than telling everyone to lose some weight and get fit so as to reduce the chance of ending up in hospital. The gigantic debt we ran up that continues to cripple our public finances (there should have been a National Crisis tax on high earners/wealth, sat in their gorgeous gardens and chucking £10ks into their ISAs while everyone else went insane and bankrupt).
But I reserve my anger for the politicians. It's their job to get this right. Be honest - if it was Starmer rather than Johnson, Biden rather than Trump, it wouldn't be the scientists being threatened with jail.
Just thinking about minor aspects of the pandemic - the madness of it all - washing your hands as you sing Happy Birthday - the supermarkets with arrow signs down the aisles - the ludicrous saucepan banging to save the fucking NHS - makes me feel simultaneously bewildered, disbelieving, and mutinous, with a side order of suicidal bleakness, as I remember how sad and alone I was in lockdown 3
So, I don't think about it. We remember wars and forget plagues, for this reason, as a wise writer noted, quite early in the pando
I proud to say I never once banged saucepans for the NHS.
Even Farage did that.
Weirdly, this particular position unites the two of us Casino, despite our manifest political differences.
Although I have to admit that I didn’t publicly announce that I was forswearing pan banging as an empty gesture. Passive avoidance is no real resistance at all in reality, but it was an argument that seemed pointless to enter in to at the time.
In other news we’re in the middle of quite a substantial Westerly Wind Burst in the western Pacific. If that continues we might be on the way to our first El Niño since the relatively strong one in late 2023.
Typically means drought-triggered hikes in global prices of soy beans (Northeast Brazil), rice (SE Asia) and wheat (Australia), the following year.
I can see and understand the rationale of banning u16s from social media, but how is social media to be defined?
For the policy to meet its objectives, mustn’t we ban children from any online chat or messaging service, and any use of group messaging at all?
And how can any of it be effectively enforced?
Bans from social media for under 16s would mean mandatory digital ID for the rest of us. Good luck with that. I'll use a VPN or failing that, emigrate, before I'll hand over my ID to Twitter, Facebook etc.
And that's before, to your point, we consider what social media is defined as.
How many of you would be happy to hand over a copy of your ID to the admins here before posting on PB?
Once again the state dresses up the march towards a draconian "papers please" society in the wrapping paper of "protecting the kids". I have two words for to say to that, and the second one is "off".
Just for some balance (because PB leans heavily towards this kind of view), the YouGov poll on this from December found 74% support for this policy (19% against). In Australia they just have a list of sites - there are obvious grey areas around things like gaming; whatsapp is not included.
Unfortunately I have a near total lack of faith in the UK to be sensible. The precedent set by the online safety act suggests a poorly worded, blanket, catch-all ban with far reaching consequences. Hence why half the internet is unusable from home now without a VPN due to sites like imgur cutting off UK access or hobbyist subreddits such as beer brewing being off limits to UK users without handing over ID etc. IIRC some gaming mod sites won't even let you download mods without handing over your papers unless you use a VPN now.
Like I say. A march towards a papers please society dressed up in hysterical "won't someone please think of the children" language despite the fact the children know very well how to circumvent these bans.
It's a ludicrous policy..💩 which seems to have a very high level of support on this forum..🥴 But then so did face masks and social distancing..
Facemasks and social distancing are effective at stopping the spread of respiratory diseases. To be contrarian about those for the sake of being contrarian reminds me of the best headline ever to describe similar views currently circulating in the US…
Indeed: one can argue that the costs were greater than the benefits*, but to argue that somehow staying away from other people and wearing masks doesn't reduce the spread of disease displays a starting sense of stupidity.
* Indeed: my schtick for about the last five years is that about 20% of the measures could have had 80% of the benefit. And I think most of the US -and particularly California**- got the balance more right (except on the issue of schools) than the UK.
** Although California did some stupid things too. Like requiring that each alternate chair on the ski lift (as in the one in front of you, not the one next to you) was empty. Meaning that there were masses of people at the bottom of the lift in a huddle, because the capacity of lifts was cut in half. Totally idiotic.
And on the flip side I'll chime in to say fuck masks and fuck lockdown. Any perceived benefits never justified the costs of either of them and society has been permanently and irreparably harmed by both policies as well as everything else that accompanied them like social distancing and furlough.
All of the bureaucrats and scientists need to pay the price for forcing these policies on the country. I hope that if we get a Reform government they'll put the guilty people in jail and throw away the key.
Of course fuck lockdowns: the UK had a shocklingly shit experience.
But the advice given in the US was little different to the advice given in the UK, it's just the politicians chose a different balance.
The idea that you should get people to 'pay a price' is staggering. They existed in an uncertain world, and gave their best answer, aware that if it turned out differently, they might have been responsible for millions of deaths.
Without a reckoning for the guilty parties including and not limited to substantial jail time there will be no deterrent for these bureaucrats and technocrats to take over the running of the country in the next crisis. It is clear that they went well beyond advice and forced their own policies onto the government of the day using media briefings and threats.
I didn't vote for Vallance and Whitty. No one did. During those two years they substantially ran government policy, they were unaccountable to the public and completely untouchable. Fauci similarly so in the US. It wasn't just them though, there was a cottage industry of politicised scientists all attempting to push their own agendas under the guise of "safety" and "save the NHS" which allowed them to reshape the country without a single vote being cast. For two years there was a coup de tat by technocrats and then they had the temerity to clear themselves of any wrongdoing in the subsequent inquiry.
I'm not for a Reform government, yet I will shed no tears if one comes and they put the lot of these usurpers in jail.
In jail for what? Giving their honest view to an elected Government and then implementing instructions?
Do you really think that's all they did? No media briefings, no calls to journalists telling them that if the politicians didn't fall in line that the NHS would collapse, no threats to politicians who disagreed with them, no "monitoring" of social media to use the arms of the state to silence those who disagreed with them under the guise of "unity".
The scientists and bureaucrats perpetrated a silent takeover of the government. No one voted for that. You may argue that people would have voted for it but it was never put to the public.
This is a fantasy in your head. Read the COVID-19 Inquiry for what actually happened. Boris was in charge throughout (well, except when he was in hospital).
MaxPB spends his time whining about PB centrists - but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up. It's a bit deranged tbh, and "the Right" would be insane to take that path rather than the one starting to appear under Badenoch.
On Streeting, I think this perception comes from the fact he's an aggressive and energetic communicator. That's a big contrast with the rest of the government, but it doesn't necessarily mean he's trying to outshine Starmer. It's almost impossible not to.
Polls say you are wrong
40-50% of the country would, right now, vote for Reform or the Greens. That’s not centrism
Similarly, 52% of the country voted for the extremely-non-centrist Brexit
One of the many many faults of middlebrow mediocre centrist dorks, such as those which infest PB, is to glibly presume “everyone is a boring clueless sensible centrist like me”
That's not what I said. What proportion of Brits do you think would support locking up civil servants and scientists from COVID and "throwing away the key"?
You literally said “99% of the country is a centrist”
Fuck me, you've spent too long at the Telegraph
"but 99% of the population is a centrist if you're the kind of person who advocates for locking COVID scientists up"
You’ve hit the nail on the head - the people who so easily dismiss as “centrist” everyone from socialists like owls and Palmer through hard core Tories like Casino and HY, not to mention our bonnie cadre of Scots Nats, have simply thrown themselves out of the Overton window and are then observing, from their position squished on the gravel driveway of reality, that everyone else seems to be still upstairs.
It would be great to define "centrism" though, and get some polling to work out what topics are included. I guess it would be something that enjoys perhaps 60 - 70% support, but there are significant fringes that are opposed. Using this, Claude gives me:
Increasing number of foreign students
Current levels of skilled immigration
Full staffing the NHS even if it means more immigration
Assisted dying
Closer ties with the EU
The Monarchy
But not included is
Increase bus services (80% support)
Clean rivers (90)
Increase investment in Renewables (over 80)
Rejoin the EU (50)
National Service (28)
Jail Chris Whitty (I would guess less than 5)
The Boriswave (less than 5)
Plus same sex marriage but not Trans in female bathrooms
On the Blair appointment, trying to be fair here, given it has been a long time since he held public office, does he still have the skills or knowledge to be useful in such a role? He has what I'm told is a consequential think tank, if there is such a thing, and he was special envoy in and around the region a decade and more ago, is any of that genuinely helpful here or do they just need figures of general recognition who are the right sort of chaps?
On the Blair appointment, trying to be fair here, given it has been a long time since he held public office, does he still have the skills or knowledge to be useful in such a role? He has what I'm told is a consequential think tank, if there is such a thing, and he was special envoy in and around the region a decade and more ago, is any of that genuinely helpful here or do they just need figures of general recognition who are the right sort of chaps?
I think Blair is pretty smart.
Also a globally recognised statesman whatever else you think of him, the only other UK PM in my lifetime in that category was Thatcher and before that you had to go back to Churchill
Comments
Instead of judges and barristers runing the inquiry, at enormous costs and creating more heat than light, they should have hired people from AAIB, RAIB, MAIB, who are used to working through how a bunch of competent and professional people still occasionally get caught up in massive accidents.
His personal tragedy (and I have some sympathy) is that having schemed and manoeuvred his way for nearly 20 years to become Conservative leader and then having won the most convincing Conservative election victory since Thatcher in December 2019, with the political world at his feet, he found the job he always coveted wasn't what he thought it would be.
Instead of being "cheerleader in chief" for a new, optimistic, positive, post-EU Britain, he found himself having to apply the most rigid control on the population since his idol, Winston Churchill, in the dark days of 1940, with the Wehrmacht in Calais and Western Europe on the cusp of falling under Nazi rule.
This wasn't an army but a virus but the net effect was the same - Boris was forced to govern in a tone which was the very antithesis of what he wanted or imagined and it didn't suit him in the way it might have suited a Theresa May or a Keir Starmer.
The big difference between COVID and other public health emergencies was the conscious decision (after a few false starts) to prioritise health over wealth. The public health of the population was deemed more important then the health of the economy or the public finances - rightly or wrongly, that was what happened.
I am sure the other issues contribute but it is clear he is not going to help Reform and will call them out
Not sure how Nadine squares that circle
As an aside, I do not expect Streeting to be sacked
Oxford. Indeed only Davey has an Oxford BA of the main party leaders now
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Hall_(singer)
That may be defensive, but it could also indicate plans to take on the Iranian regime
Imagine a world in which Major, Clarke, May, Cameron, Gove, Boris, Hammond, Rishi, Heseltine, or any two them had denounced the Tories and come out for Reform. Things would look very different.
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(That's true of annexing part of Mexico to be part of California, and the late 19C War where the USA occupied Cuba. I'm not sure about the Spanish War of 1819.)
Reza Pahlavi is still encouraging Iranians to the streets, and Trump’s red line has been very clearly crossed. He might be many things but what he himself is certain of, is that he is not Barack Obama.
In the background, the analysts will be pitching this as now or never. They are desperate to clean up the global board as much as possible, in anticipation of a possible great power struggle with China in 2027.
The other issue is what follows the theocracy? I don't know how much support Pahlavi really has - it's impossible to know - and all he's ever said is he sees himself as a transitional figure so what or who follows the mullahs?
Nobody, I suspect, wants a destabilised Iran riven with anarchy and close to open civil war. We know groups at the edges might seek to break from the current state and we have no clue how Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Iraq and others will react to a change in the Government in Tehran.
As to public reaction in the event of a co-ordinated attempt to remove the theocrats, it would be interesting to see people dancing on the head of the pin condemning Washington while trying not to support the mullahs but there are wider questions than domestic British political opinion and whether the "right" enjoy the disomfort of the "left" or whether those slavishly loyal to whatever Washington says and does will or would support civilian deaths (accidental).
Europe, by comparison, does have naval resources there, but Europe has nearly twice as many escort-type vessels than the USN, and the USN ones have to cover worldwide and escort all their carrier groups.
But the Houthis are on ceasefire, and the Suez Canal route is in the process of probably reopening (2 carrier groups). Maersk sent a USA flagged ship through there recently, which is the first time for two years.
What's Going on with Shipping had videos about those recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRBYt_O70To
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrRo0zn20-0
"They" is the President, and without explicit Congressional authorisation, it's completely outside of his powers, and also in breach of international treaty ratified by Congress, and therefore illegal under US domestic law.
But by all means, carry on pretending it's normal.
Exercise Cygnus in 2016 modelled a pandemic. Many of its conclusions were not acted upon. The Covid pandemic was Cygnus on steroids and its lessons too will be ignored while the inquiry drones on about civil service email exchanges and alt-right pundits wonder about blaming Biden or Fauci or whether it was a bat in the market or a bat in the lab or whether the bat in the market was the bat in the lab.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exercise_Cygnus
Where, next time, will we find hospital beds, PPE, drugs and vaccines? Can we store them, buy them or make them? What behaviour changes will be needed? Will we have better modelling software? Do we need test and trace and if so, can we separate them? Can there be scientists on call to rapidly test assumptions (eg we got everything about droplets wrong last time because the textbooks were wrong).
It's not free either. The Covid inquiry costs £5 million pounds a quarter, £20 million a year, and it is still going.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/uk-covid-19-inquiry-response-costs-for-quarter-4-2425/uk-covid-19-inquiry-response-costs-for-quarter-4-2425
Though I do particularly like the 1818 changes to have a straighter border with Canada.
Vermont joined the USA in 1791,itbwas the 14th state, but I think it was allowed to join voluntarily rather than being annexed
They're still at the intimidation to reduce the price they'll have to pay stage.
That assessment might be wrong of course, but I’m reasonably convinced at this point that ceteris paribus they expect a direct confrontation with China, and are taking all steps they can to shape the board ahead of time and/or boost deterrence against a Taiwan event.
Granted, it is in part because it is so big, but I remember a meme about how the USA always seems to find itself with all the great resources it needs, like they discover oil or rare earths whenever they want it (the latter may be less true, IDK), as though they were playing Civililization on easy mode.
Look at the noise they made about a non big beast, careless about £5,000,000 owed to HMRC, ex Tory CoE just this week.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/U.S._Territorial_Acquisitions.png
And your analysis still makes no sense since it has been pointed out the USA realistically has the right to do whatever it wants in Greenland anyway, so the acquisitiveness angle alienating allies undermines efforts to deal with China. It's not like the US's stronger allies are suddenly going to pal up to China and they cannot just pull away entirely, but co-operation and such assistance as they need will, in the decades to come, be trickier than they would have been if they'd not started threatening to invade close allies.
If you can secure your aims (viz a viz defence of Greenland) without alienating allies yet you choose to do so anyway, that's a weird choice. That'd be like me threatening to mug a relative for money when they were willing to give me whatever I wanted anyway - my other relatives will take note next I come asking.
(Yes, geopolitics is more complex than a family analogy).
And since Denmark wouldn't have stood in the way of anything short of annexation, what more can they offer to get him to drop it? The threat of the end of NATO, which Trump thinks is just a drain on America? It's why it has to be genuinely desired, since there doesn't seem to be any other concessions that Trump can extract as the hidden 'real' motive.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/15/ronald-lauder-billionaire-donor-donald-trump-ukraine-greenland
That is enough five years before I can apply for an ESTA.....
Sunder Katwala (sundersays)
@sundersays.bsky.social
After having his defection ambushed, Robert Jenrick could have got onto front-foot by calling a by-election. He could dramatise his claims about a democratic shift in the right. He would have a more credible case about risk > personal ambition
(I also think he would have won it pretty comfortably)
https://bsky.app/profile/sundersays.bsky.social/post/3mcmekrx6t225
As a really obvious example, medical gowns. Should we now be buying them, storing them, and using the bottom of the stored pile, with a year’s supply in the store? Do we have companies in the UK with whom we can contract to make more of them in an emergency, and do they have access to stockpiles of the raw materials required?
The main reason may be they anticipate more defections, plus they genuinely have a shot at real power now so no need for such games, but has that specific question been put to him?
If China does go for Taiwan it’s going to be WWIII, and right now only the Americans are prepared to fight the war.
I assume that the Danes (etc) having seen what happened in Caracas are now ready to defend Nuuk again the sort of 'American Commando' attack we saw there.
I'd say that's attractive to 15-20% of the electorate, not 99%, but due to the demographic on pb.com they are heavily overrepresented on here - and consistently confused as to why the sands are shifting beneath them.
In town, we have a traffic problem. An A road ends on a roundabout where it meets another A road (3 exits). The whole lot is always stationary at peak times, which then backs up the rest of town. Except, if you actually drive through it every day, one quickly realises that the queues aren't caused by the roundabout at-all, but by a really busy pedestrian crossing about 100 yards after the busiest exit, the queues from which keep the roundabout blocked. Inevitably, when travelling in either direction you queue to these lights, then it's moving traffic beyond.
Anyway, my local council is currently running sponsored posts on Facebook to get people to fill in a survey about possible improvements to this junction, as they've finally noticed that the traffic is terrible and air quality poor (it's been like it for years, although it's steadily got worse because of massively excessive house building for the available infrastructure, which has increased traffic levels noticeably).
The key survey question (after figuring out where you live and how you use the junction) asks to you to indicate if you think that any of the following would help:
-introducing traffic signals
-improving pedestrian crossings
-adding cycle lanes or facilities
-widening pavements
-better signage and wayfinding
-improved lighting
-features to increase accessibility
All of these, with one possible exception, will at best do nothing, and in all probability will make the traffic and air quality problems worse.
The possible exception is if by "improving pedestrian crossings" they can find a way to close the problematic one, and replace it with a overbridge (not trivial, but the geography makes it a less ridiculous idea than it might sound). But I'm pretty sure that's not in their plan.
Not on the list is the solution that most people want - a mile long bypass over very straightforward terrain, which would take a huge volume of traffic out of town completely, including thousands of lorries a day, but which the council is refusing to contemplate, even as an unfunded long-term aspiration.
Meanwhile, their short term aspirations include (against huge local opposition*) letting developers build 700 more homes in a location where the residents will need to use the congested road and junction for almost any journey anywhere.
I've seen this so many times before. We'll end up with a load of public money wasted, and the junction worse than before. If anyone tells you councils haven't got enough money, they are lying, all the while they are also still doing stuff like this.
*I'm not a NIMBY, or even anywhere near one. But I can see our town has been wrecked by being allowed to grow 20% in size over 15 years without a single peices of corresponding infrastructure being put in place. I'm fine with building - but only if it comes with everything else it needs to support it.
Even Farage did that.
It's a salutatory lesson as to what would have happened if Britain had ever been under occupation by the Nazis; collaboration would have been absolutely rife.
I think under any other PM than Boris, Covid would have been much worse.
It was bad enough as it is.
Trump is more interested in his tariff war with China than a miliitary one
He thought nation states had ceased to have relevance; forget a federal Europe - he'd have favoured an entirely unitary one.
"Centrist" is said more in hope than reality; most people do not favour liberal internationalism and open borders.
John Redwood of the big beasts is probably the likeliest to go Reform followed by IDS but both of them like Kemi so aren't going anywhere for now.
The only remaining Tory I think is more likely than not to go Reform is Braverman, even Francois has now said Jenrick was wrong and a traitor to his former supporters and he ran Jenrick's leadership campaign
Or your dog.
Around 13 mins
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002pqgv
Although I have to admit that I didn’t publicly announce that I was forswearing pan banging as an empty gesture. Passive avoidance is no real resistance at all in reality, but it was an argument that seemed pointless to enter in to at the time.
"The London property market might be about to implode"
https://spectator.com/article/the-london-property-market-might-be-about-to-implode/
Typically means drought-triggered hikes in global prices of soy beans (Northeast Brazil), rice (SE Asia) and wheat (Australia), the following year.
Possibly they did a tiny bit of Maine to Canada as well.