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A number that gets bandied about uncritically is 28,330, which was the estimated number of deaths from flu in the 2014/15 winter period. If the final Covid count is around that number, nobody is going to look at the fact it was over a much shorter period with far more extreme measures taken, they'll say it was a lot of fuss about nothing. E: In 1973 there was an epidemic of London Flu in the US. HJB fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Apr 19, 2020 |
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Apr 19, 2020 11:05
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I can't get enough of are Dan 
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OwlFancier posted:gove has watched one too many movies and thinks it sounds cool Some Like It (Run) Hot Gonzo McFee posted:Yeah but could you Imagine if Jeremy Corbyn was in charge? He'd be calling the virus his friend!!! 😂😂😂 PM Corbyn refuses to commit to using Trident on coronavirus, and is immediately VONCed by his own party
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Apr 19, 2020 11:06
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Lmaooooooo https://twitter.com/HadleyFreeman/status/1251786058825695232?s=19 The replies are great
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Apr 19, 2020 11:10
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Vitamin P posted:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/apr/19/labour-party-financial-peril-keir-starmer-members-leaked-report quote:Mark Lewis, a lawyer who has been contacted by those seeking legal action, told the Observer: “There are lots and lots of claims. There are claims under the Data Protection Act, there are claims for breach of confidence or invasion of privacy and there are claims for libel. It is a very lengthy report that mentions a lot of people. I’ve been contacted by 15 people. Each one of them could well have several claims. What is going on is phenomenal. It’s a bit like the soldiers leaving a barracks that they have to desert and setting it on fire. good thing the guardian just prints his claim unchallenged!
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Apr 19, 2020 11:13
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Supporting journalism such as * checks Guardian * multiple articles defending woody allen.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:14
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Aphex- posted:Lmaooooooo The perfect Liberal take 
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Apr 19, 2020 11:14
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Apr 19, 2020 11:15
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Ever since reading “Learned Optimism” I keep thinking most problems boil down to two facts: 1. People like optimists and overwhelmingly vote for them to be in power, and 2. Optimists are completely stupid and sail through life saying everything is great, nobody’s poor, there won’t be a pandemic, everything’ll be back to normal soon, what’s everyone so worried about? The government’s behaviour makes perfect sense in that regard. Unfortunately the worse things get the more people want an optimist in power and want an optimistic outlook, so yes, absolutely the narrative after COVID will be that it all worked out in the end and wasn’t a big deal, in fact we all had a jolly good time
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Apr 19, 2020 11:18
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To which the only answer, as always, is an optimism based on our actual ability to make better lives for ourselves rather than the false and desperate clinging to things that we know, on some level, are utterly hollow.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:24
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Miftan posted:The perfect Liberal take "Won't someone think of the oligarchs!!"
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Apr 19, 2020 11:27
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sinky posted:Supporting journalism such as * checks Guardian * multiple articles defending woody allen. I'm ignorant... Is the guardian good or bad in the way that the BBC is good or bad?
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Apr 19, 2020 11:49
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The Times article is good but seems naive: "One day there will inevitably be an inquiry into the lack of preparations during those “lost” five weeks from January 24. There will be questions about when politicians understood the severity of the threat, what the scientists told them and why so little was done to equip the National Health Service for the coming crisis. It will be the politicians who will face the most intense scrutiny." Any inquiry will lay the blame squarely on China, scientists and fat-cat NHS managers. Tory politicians and the press will be absolved (perhaps one or two sacrificial lambs who will still get a seat in the House of Lords). Labour will take a bigger share of the blame for not mounting an effective opposition, too busy with their internal squabbles. Even in that article you can see the future spin; okay Bro Johnson missed that first Cobra meeting, but he went to meet a load of important Chinese people that day instead - if it was such a big deal why did they not make him listen? Add suitable soundbites to taste ("Inscrutable Orientals", "blitz spirit" , etc etc etc.).
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Apr 19, 2020 11:52
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French Canadian posted:I'm ignorant... Is the guardian good or bad in the way that the BBC is good or bad? The guardian believes the truth is in the middle and will attack anything left wing. If it was a person it would be a 32 year old Lib Dem membership holding computer programmer on twitter who secretly voted Tory and will “well actually” at women and then bitch about “reasonable discourse” when told to gently caress off.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:56
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French Canadian posted:I'm ignorant... Is the guardian good or bad in the way that the BBC is good or bad? No, the BBC is an arm of the British State so it performs soft propaganda abroad through news and cultural production to create a pro-British sentiment while domestically it acts to validate the bourgeois State culture (right wing, pro-imperialism, xenophobic) but operates a pretense of impartiality by criticising elements of government which move too far from the generally accepted culture. The Guardian is a liberal paper, it talks a good game about peoples rights and is fine talking about the various hardships and problems in the world but ideologically is unwilling to support the necessary solutions to them - austerity is killing the poor and vulnerable but aren't Corbyns spending plans just too much?
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Apr 19, 2020 11:58
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learnincurve posted:The guardian believes the truth is in the middle and will attack anything left wing. If it was a person it would be a 32 year old Lib Dem membership holding computer programmer on twitter who secretly voted Tory and will “well actually” at women and then bitch about “reasonable discourse” when told to gently caress off. I was going to respond but I'm not entirely sure I could put it better than this tbh so I will second it. Extremely, painfully liberal. Like the platonic ideal of liberalism, entirely devoid of substance but extremely performative in all the worst ways.
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Apr 19, 2020 11:59
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Filboid Studge posted:For all that the Tories should never be in charge, Corbyn as PM during the triple-tap of Covid, the worst global recession in 150 years and Brexit would probably have scuppered the project. The crises would have been handled infinitely better but the media wouldn’t allow that to be widely held.  I reckon the first thing to happen during a Corbyn lockdown (started 1-2 weeks earlier) would be the media openly telling the public to ignore it. They'd accuse Labour of overreaction & wanting to destroy Britain's economy, and we'd see far more people violating rules. That will of course be Corbyn's fault. As the mortalities increase the narrative would shift to him being a 'weak leader' who failed to impose his own rules despite him being actively undermined every step of the way. I'm struggling to see any positive alternative scenario that doesn't begin with Fleet Street being ground zero for the outbreak.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:00
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French Canadian posted:I'm ignorant... Is the guardian good or bad in the way that the BBC is good or bad? Yes, they're both bad.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:01
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namesake posted:No, the BBC is an arm of the British State so it performs soft propaganda abroad through news and cultural production to create a pro-British sentiment while domestically it acts to validate the bourgeois State culture (right wing, pro-imperialism, xenophobic) but operates a pretense of impartiality by criticising elements of government which move too far from the generally accepted culture. re: this I keep thinking back to frantz fanon's thing about colonized minds, and while he was writing about it in the context of nations, I have this nagging feeling that it might also apply across classes, because we're at the point where the culture producing class is so alienated from everyone else that they might as well be a foreign country, especially it seems like, in the UK where a large part of that is literally run by the state and they're all public school kiddy fiddlers. And so you get this response where there's a portion of people trying to bootlick that culture and a portion of people rejecting it in lovely reactionary ways and it all gets in the way of working class organization.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:04
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xtothez posted:
Hypothetically the early Labour COBRA meetings would have spurred increased domestic production of medical necessities and earlier approaching of the engineering firms to develop new ventilators as part of the revitalising manufacturing and greening production along with not such a half arsed re-recruitment program for NHS workers so we would actually have been in a better state to deal with the situation even as the media openly made things worse by criticising every part of the response plan and telling people to keep going out.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:06
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namesake posted:No, the BBC is an arm of the British State so it performs soft propaganda abroad through news and cultural production to create a pro-British sentiment while domestically it acts to validate the bourgeois State culture (right wing, pro-imperialism, xenophobic) but operates a pretense of impartiality by criticising elements of government which move too far from the generally accepted culture. Also rampant transphobia.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:07
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looking forward to gove convincing everyone re "gently caress it let's do it hot" and then us basically repeating the first first weeks of the government effectively trying to spread the disease while the public decide that actually they still don't want to catch it tyvm
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Apr 19, 2020 12:17
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OwlFancier posted:re: this I keep thinking back to frantz fanon's thing about colonized minds, and while he was writing about it in the context of nations, I have this nagging feeling that it might also apply across classes, because we're at the point where the culture producing class is so alienated from everyone else that they might as well be a foreign country, especially it seems like, in the UK where a large part of that is literally run by the state and they're all public school kiddy fiddlers. This isn't a new thing for capitalism though, the break from hereditary class in feudalism to class divide by ownership means that a value system around 'virtuous' qualities of business had to be created and consciously imposed on society. Basically by definition capitalism has to reinforce the desirability of being an entrepreneur or a business owner as a moral principle because the naked truth of it simply worshipping power was a little too obvious. Cultural production therefore has to be included within that strategy so that popular art, music, literature industries all exists to pat themselves on the back and applaud their betters and serve as a cover as all this 'natural' production must show that how things are is actually how they should be. At this point the fact that there absolutely is a base of workers who are openly rejecting the culture of capitalism is a really good thing but we're experiencing the usual problem that all the powers of society are aligned to crush the left and it's loving hard to make breakthroughs to connect with them. It's things like the thursday clap which are political events that we need to fight for and win - there's an effort to shout slogans during the clap - 'Test test test, PPE, keep key workers virus free' - to take the action and move it in our favour.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:22
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namesake posted:This isn't a new thing for capitalism though, the break from hereditary class in feudalism to class divide by ownership means that a value system around 'virtuous' qualities of business had to be created and consciously imposed on society. Basically by definition capitalism has to reinforce the desirability of being an entrepreneur or a business owner as a moral principle because the naked truth of it simply worshipping power was a little too obvious. Cultural production therefore has to be included within that strategy so that popular art, music, literature industries all exists to pat themselves on the back and applaud their betters and serve as a cover as all this 'natural' production must show that how things are is actually how they should be. Oh yes of course to be clear I don't think rejecting the culture is wrong, and the concept of a cultural disconnect isn't new. It's just his phrasing of it that keeps coming back to me, colonized mind. A mind hollowed out and filled with an alien, destructive force, that prevents the liberation of the body and the suppressed consciousness.
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Apr 19, 2020 12:44
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quote:THE MAIL ON SUNDAY SAYS GO OUT AND ENJOY OUR GLORIOUS WEATHER. And then 2 or 3 months later quote:WORST DEATH TOLL IN BRITAIN IN LIVING MEMORY. I fear it is true that where a Corbyn government was concerned, the only thing worse than not getting what I wanted would have been getting what I wanted :/
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Apr 19, 2020 13:09
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On the other that would be an excellent premise for shutting down the press.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:12
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I think if it came to that Corbyn would have suddenly got depressed and gone for a walk in some woods and committed suicide.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:15
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It's getting to me today. I keep remembering the faces of the workers in the hospital and how in all that feeling of militarization it'd built up it felt like a front line, not metaphorically but actually, and they were doing it anyway. Scared, but doing it anyway because they felt they had to. And ho boy, the journalist class is pissing me off. On the one hand they're writing fluff pieces for the middle class audiences on "top ways to get through this horrible thing, blitz spirit, here's 10 little ideas, just order these things on Amazon so you can Do Activities, it's going to be such larks" and I'm thinking of all the people working those shifts at the picking warehouses to make it happen. The other hand they're tutting and shaking their heads at the government response from January and saying "how blind you were, and you made all these pensioners and at risk people expendable" and I'm just thinking, don't you see you're doing the exact same thing now across class lines while you turn this whole thing into a fun little camp out in the garden? When you get bored and itchy and writing about how it's time to get back to normal now, declaring a whole bunch of people expendable because they need to be out there to serve you your loving latte. Don't you see what's coming if you keep doing that? Don't you see what you're consigning people to? I don't get how so many people are blundering through this oblivious. I'm locked down till June, I can't get out there anyway, but even if I could I feel like typhoid mary anyway, scared about the virions I'm stirring up and who's going to be the unlucky one to take them home. I don't get how so many people don't care.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:27
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Thinking about other people as real people, and doing it often, is something you have to learn, and something you have to learn directly in opposition to society. Society does not encourage that learning, it quite specifically discourages it, it encourages you to believe that you do it but not to actually do it. Because believing that you do it is the triumph of the self over society, actually doing it is allowing society to intrude into your personal bubble. What matters to people is the self perception that they are decent, socially responsible people, but that has nothing to do with whether they actually are, because their belief in their own decency and social responsibility is determined by their peer group and by the ideas they're exposed to, and weirdly a bunch of purely performative middle class assholes will all tell each other that they're perfect as long as they perform the stupid middle class rituals, and any interference of actual reality is something to avoid as much as possible, because it invites difficult questions when they'd all much prefer to keep up the circlejerk.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:34
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crispix posted:And then 2 or 3 months later Just back from the co-op and they had a large sandwich board outside advertising "affordable funerals".
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Apr 19, 2020 13:34
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Miftan posted:If 20 people with assault rifles were on the steps of the mayor's office and they happened to all be black and protesting about something far less stupid, like the police not executing black people, I guarantee you it'd be a "riot" OwlFancier posted:Oh yes of course to be clear I don't think rejecting the culture is wrong, and the concept of a cultural disconnect isn't new. Biko's call is along similar lines that the biggest strength of the oppressor is in the minds of the oppressed, who have been miseducated and must become conscious of themselves as a mass. The big danger of applying that here is that the dynamics are different. The 00's BNP learned from Biko (not sure if on purpose or by osmosis) and "I am against the fact that a settler minority should impose an entire system of values on an indigenous people." can be found in both (in one case as utter lies ofc). What I think we need is something more like in Chav Solidarity, more of a 'rejecting the serf mind' type thing.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:35
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crispix posted:I think if it came to that Corbyn would have suddenly got depressed and gone for a walk in some woods and committed suicide. Nah depending on the particulars then the entire Labour cabinet would have gotten coronavirus at the same time and then there's a national unity government lashed together in a week which puts a Tory as PM and then continues throughout even if the cabinet recovers or the military has been called up to operate things but then steadily takes on more and more decision-making roles until oops looks like Corbyn isn't running the country any more.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:35
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Guavanaut posted:I've not read Fanon (I keep meaning to) but I have read Biko, and Biko has read Fanon. Similarly I haven't either but Friere did and mentions him a fair bit, specifically in his take about the transformation of people from historical objects to subjects, where he seems to think of it as a kind of sub-sapient state almost, like you can't really know yourself until you break out of it.
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Apr 19, 2020 13:39
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Was this posted: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/response-to-ft-article-and-twitter-thread-by-peter-foster
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Apr 19, 2020 13:57
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Jippa posted:Was this posted: i never expected to see a quote-each-paragraph-seperately angry forum post on the government website
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Apr 19, 2020 14:05
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I can't even see the point, who even knew the government website had a news section? What kind of brain problem would you need to have to actually check the drat thing?
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Apr 19, 2020 14:06
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https://twitter.com/richardosman/status/1251810159686569986 The new desperate journo tactics of equating newspapers with food is so pathetic, jesus.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:13
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If he wants to suggest that newspaper articles are a mindless triviality that you could easily live without I'm not going to argue.
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Apr 19, 2020 14:16
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Just been to the newsagent and can't believe that if I accept the cookies I have to allow advertisers into my house to take photos of everything I own. very real problems
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Apr 19, 2020 14:17
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why does the gov even need a news section when they have the BBC? also if corbyn was PM he'd already be being forced out of power because of the appalling 5,000 deaths in the UK by now
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Apr 19, 2020 14:25
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i don't have to wake up every sunday to news of mars bars attacking the abstract concept of trans children so they get a pass imo
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Apr 19, 2020 14:33
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