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Do you prefer the extended summer thread format? This poll is closed. |
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126 | 44.21% |
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39 | 13.68% |
| I'm Scottish |
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120 | 42.11% |
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qhat posted:London in Ye Olden Days was a melting pot of Extremely Dangerous diseases. Plague gets a bad rap because well it kills lots of people all at once, but this was also a time when people were also being wiped out in the tens of thousands by cholera, small pox, measles, tuberculosis, and many more. People dying in swathes from disease was not unheard of back then. Or polio, which has been with us a long time, but really came into its own with better sanitation and treatment for cholera and diphtheria, possibly because of a later age of infection leading to more cases of non-abortive polio. Either way, polio epidemics were unknown before the 20th century, but poliomyelitis was not.  Fun* fact for the "99% of covid is asymptomatic" crew (regardless of whether that number is probably bollocks) cholera is 95% mild/asymptomatic and only 0.2% fatal in a developing medical infrastructure, and polio is >99% abortive and far less than 1% fatal, and both of those diseases are terrible and demanded wide ranging action, so they can shut the gently caress up. Borrovan posted:*not fun But as Jaeluni Asjil often says, people don't know how percentages work. e: 1945 - The first inactivated influenza vaccine is licenced for use in civilians. Guavanaut fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 10:55
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I used to post quite a lot about the FD at my old job and what an awful man he is. In February last year he dragged me into an office, told me off for "scaremongering" and told me it wasn't my place to tell other staff to wash their hands, or to decide off my own back to take extra precautions (using hand sanitizer, wiping down a shared desk before I used it). He said that Covid was going to be just like the Millennium Bug - a lot of fuss and wasted money and then literally nothing would happen. It was at this point I realised that he wasn't only a horrible man, but utterly, utterly stupid as well. At the meeting the day before lockdown was announced, when everyone was arguing for WFH except him and one other director, he yelled at me "[SANFORD] I AM NOT WASTING MY MONEY TO PREVENT YOUR PARENTS CATCHING A COLD." On a somewhat related note at my new job I'm about to get fired for calling out a director, the head of service delivery, and the head of the dev team for repeatedly cracking 'jokes' about another member of staff being pregnant - because she'd been to the doctors. She is an apprentice in her first job, at least 40 years younger than the youngest of them, and he just had the loving gall to tell me if she didn't like it she could say so herself and didn't need me to step in. I said I don't like it and I will call it out if it happens again and he said "I don't like people who disagree with me" and hung up. Proper old-school bollocks and I'm mad as hell. I called it out in the softest loving fashion as well. Stupid old bastards.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:12
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ThomasPaine posted:I definitely remember reading a few facebook posts from perhaps dumber/less cynical people I went to school with essentially saying 'just stay in for a month and if we all do that we'll be through it in time to have wild beer garden weather in the summer (of 2020) and it's going to be a crazy party' lol I remember a friend from college saying on Facebook in March/April 2020 that our (Ireland's) approach was wrong and we should do what they were doing in England/Sweden and just let everyone get the virus, we'll all develop herd immunity and be sorted out by the Summer. I said that even if you ignore all the deaths, we had no way of knowing if the virus might mutate and make that plan pointless. His last word on the subject was that if you were worried about mutations, then no vaccine would ever work. It was at that stage I figured that lots of people were arguing about this subject but not everyone was doing it from the same level of understanding of the issues and just left. I think history will bear out all my choices.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:22
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Pistol_Pete posted:I don't think so: all societies lacking antibiotics and good sanitation have had to grapple with regular disease outbreaks: there was nothing special about Medieval France and England in that regard. My point is more that there's something special about modern society in that regard (the antibiotics and good sanitation) that could leave us less able to absorb a shock that an older society could weather.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:28
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ThomasPaine posted:Speaking of the black death that's another thing: this has revealed how utterly, utterly fragile our society would be in the face of any genuine existential crisis. Covid, in reality, shouldn't be such a big deal. It has a very low actual death rate and even serious illness is uncommon except amongst very specific vulnerable groups. It spreads easily only indoors and specifically in areas of poor ventilation. It shouldn't take much to mitigate it through effective government action and behavioural adaptation, and we've seen this happen this in certain states that have bold central government strategy combined with a cultural sense of broad collective responsibility (China being the big one). I think you sort of already touched on what would have happened if the virus was more deadly. Folk would have taken it much more seriously than they did. If there was a 50/50 chance of you personally dying (felt more personally by the odds of an existing family member or friend already dying of it) folk probably wouldn't be out complaining about not getting a summer holiday and would have been more inclined to stay indoors as much as possible. The extension of the selfishness would probably cover their self interest of staying alive and adhering to stricter self governance of vague rules. As it stands, folk give less of a poo poo because a huge chuck of the population only know it's a thing because its in the news and shops have restrictions.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:30
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Sanford posted:I used to post quite a lot about the FD at my old job and what an awful man he is. In February last year he dragged me into an office, told me off for "scaremongering" and told me it wasn't my place to tell other staff to wash their hands, or to decide off my own back to take extra precautions (using hand sanitizer, wiping down a shared desk before I used it). He said that Covid was going to be just like the Millennium Bug - a lot of fuss and wasted money and then literally nothing would happen. It was at this point I realised that he wasn't only a horrible man, but utterly, utterly stupid as well. At the meeting the day before lockdown was announced, when everyone was arguing for WFH except him and one other director, he yelled at me "[SANFORD] I AM NOT WASTING MY MONEY TO PREVENT YOUR PARENTS CATCHING A COLD." What sort of crusty old gammon places have you been working at, Jesus
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Jun 15, 2021 11:30
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That's what I imagine most companies are like at the top, just wall to wall lumpy old men leering at women and making stupid decisions.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:36
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Spangly A posted:The only point I'm making is that the "unprecedented" line is an excuse for a global fuckup of lazy liberal governance that's killed nearly 4m people. And the only person bringing it up was jam grandad.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:38
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OwlFancier posted:just wall to wall lumpy old men leering at women and making stupid decisions. 
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Jun 15, 2021 11:42
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Man I love getting the updates of Sanford continually going through life calling people on their bullshit, king poo poo. Also, on HIV/plague, it's an interesting hypothesis that either bubonic plague or smallpox might have selected for a European population with a widespread mutation ccr5-∆32 that confers HIV resistance in about 10% of the population. It's debated, but neat
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Jun 15, 2021 11:42
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Sanford posted:On a somewhat related note at my new job I'm about to get fired for calling out a director, the head of service delivery, and the head of the dev team for repeatedly cracking 'jokes' about another member of staff being pregnant - because she'd been to the doctors. She is an apprentice in her first job, at least 40 years younger than the youngest of them, and he just had the loving gall to tell me if she didn't like it she could say so herself and didn't need me to step in. I said I don't like it and I will call it out if it happens again and he said "I don't like people who disagree with me" and hung up. Proper old-school bollocks and I'm mad as hell. I called it out in the softest loving fashion as well. Stupid old bastards.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:42
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Contains two women who often make very stupid decisions, plus no walls 
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Jun 15, 2021 11:43
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https://twitter.com/chaoswithkeith/status/1404751254732132354
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Jun 15, 2021 11:43
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https://twitter.com/tristandross/status/1404411168047996929
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Jun 15, 2021 11:47
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ThomasPaine posted:Back in the 1100s or whatever a particularly cold winter had a very much non zero chance of doing you in. This is still true in the UK today and there's probs 5-10 thousand old people who die every winter due to cold.
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Jun 15, 2021 11:49
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If you fuse trudeau and merkel you get "you know I had to do it to em"
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Jun 15, 2021 11:51
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Algol Star posted:This is still true in the UK today and there's probs 5-10 thousand old people who die every winter due to cold. I know but you get my point
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Jun 15, 2021 11:59
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ThomasPaine posted:What sort of crusty old gammon places have you been working at, Jesus The old place was pretty progressive except the FD (who owned most of the business) who was and remains a stone-cold oval office. The new place is a boy's club - 3 of 4 directors are brothers, most of the staff have worked here for at least a decade. They're really nice guys but very old fashioned in some bad ways, staunchly anti-racist I'm glad to say but not up to scratch elsewhere. I've already asked them to cut it out with this software demo they do that involves looking at a shopping basket that's got a dress and some nail polish in it, and every loving time they make some stupid loving joke about oooh that's for the weekends when I go by Pauline deary in a camp voice and AAAAARGH
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Jun 15, 2021 12:01
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OwlFancier posted:If you fuse trudeau and merkel you get "you know I had to do it to em" This also creates a super Saiyan of pure neoliberalism
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Jun 15, 2021 12:14
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Actually I'm reliably informed that the reason people won't vote Labour is precisely because of lefties not supporting Starmer supporting the government. Support Labour: vote Tory.
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Jun 15, 2021 12:47
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Not sure if you can use it without signing in to your personal tax account to use it for which you will either need to set up a 'verify' or get a government gateway ID. (I use Post Office verify. I have so many government gateways over the years I have lost the plot with those). Aagh I was just complaining about this Verify poo poo. I want to check my NHS pension to make sure it still exists, and the Verify systems that are now required won't Verify me because I don't have a UK credit record. Why the gently caress do I need a credit check to look at my pension? Why is this privatised?
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Jun 15, 2021 12:48
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Marmaduke! posted:Actually I'm reliably informed that the reason people won't vote Labour is precisely because of lefties not supporting Starmer supporting the government. Support Labour: vote Tory. He was trying to argue that Starmer was clever and playing the long game, appealing to people like our great aunt and uncle who are afraid of losing their house if interest rates go up. And that was his entire argument. Nothing about how absolutely bezerk it is that he has no policies and abstains on everything. He was saying he'd been asking people why they hate Starmer and 'nobody could tell him why'l,' so I ran him through the 10 pledges, the RLB sacking, the spy cops bill, the schools reopening but he just kept circling back to interest rates and houses, and how the public don't like the word socialism so Corbyn was wrong to associate himself with it. It definitely ended up in agree to disagree territory but it was weird hearing melt poo poo coming out of his mouth.
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Jun 15, 2021 12:58
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It is incredible that after Hartleypool the consensus among pretty much everyone was that Labour lost because it didn’t have any policies, and we’re now however long it’s been, with another by-election in a few weeks, and they still don’t have any policies.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:02
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I had a very confusing conversation with my older brother, who I've always thought of as being better than me at politics and further left as well. Sorry about your brother's brain. Melts love claiming that the public hate socialism when it's quite clearly the opposite and people like socialist policies but are held back by non-policy attacks on the left.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:03
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Reveilled posted:My point is more that there's something special about modern society in that regard (the antibiotics and good sanitation) that could leave us less able to absorb a shock that an older society could weather. It's not the antibiotics, it's the modernity (and the capitalism). During the Black Death the average person would have up to a year's worth of food in their house, and would mostly obtain that (via markets etc) from an area more-or-less within walking distance of their home. Even in the most apocalyptic of scenarios, most villages and even larger towns would be able to continue with only a bit of a speed bump because the extremely inefficient - and necessarily seasonal - nature of food production and distribution meant that there was always a huge amount of slack that could be taken up before things started getting really bad. Even by the Industrial Revolution the big cities were still extremely insulated from supply shocks because again the inefficiencies provided slack. The loom operator in Manchester might not be able to go and forage for food and fuel in the way his great grandparents had if it all went tits up, but - because nobody could be arsed selling coal in individual lumps - he'd probably have a couple of weeks worth of fuel and food on hand, water would come from a pump or a well, and there'd still be a pretty big granary somewhere near by. Nowadays our supply lines are far, far longer and - while remarkably robust individually - the interconnectedness means failures ripple out in the weirdest of ways. Of course we've literally just lived through a warning shot of that - just the *rumour* of a toilet paper shortage completely wrong-footed the entire system for over a month, because the system has been honed to such a razor's edge of efficiency that an unexpected fluctuation *just of demand*, not even of supply, completely exhausts the reserves in the system, and also causes cascading failures because while no part of the toilet paper supply chain overlaps with the pasta or egg supply system (at least not until the very, very end) we are so utterly used to the idea that a fluorescent-lit building will hold, at any time, any possible food we might desire that the moment that starts to not be the case we all panic and start grabbing everything we can. A journalist in Australia makes an overwrought report about a slight supply disruption at a pulp facility there and 6 weeks later, on the other side of the world this happens:  Now imagine what would happen if we actually lost a significant chunk of our production or distribution capabilities.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:04
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Comrade Fakename posted:It is incredible that after Hartleypool the consensus among pretty much everyone was that Labour lost because it didn’t have any policies, and we’re now however long it’s been, with another by-election in a few weeks, and they still don’t have any policies. I mean it's pretty predictable if you think they are pathologically terrified of having policies because the only ones they are willing to conscience are incredibly unpopular.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:09
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this is absurd and hilarious , this is like gary glitter becoming a unicef ambassador
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Jun 15, 2021 13:18
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https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/1404766060381933573 I guess they assumed they could plop this out while everyone's complaining about the extended lockdown, especially now they've got GB News as an additional source of interference for them.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:19
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Algol Star posted:Sorry about your brother's brain. Melts love claiming that the public hate socialism when it's quite clearly the opposite and people like socialist policies but are held back by non-policy attacks on the left. be careful with this - voters, capricious creatures that they are, are allowed to want contradictory policies at the same time both this and this can be stably true patterns of policy support
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Jun 15, 2021 13:23
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lol that the BBC article fails to mention that Cressida Dick has been personally censured about this. Double lol that she will remain commissioner of the Met because nothing matters. Triple lol that being personally responsible for a murder didn't matter either. goddamnedtwisto posted:https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking/status/1404766060381933573
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Jun 15, 2021 13:23
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This is what it means to say the State has a monopoly on violence
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Jun 15, 2021 13:40
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Comrade Fakename posted:It is incredible that after Hartleypool the consensus among pretty much everyone was that Labour lost because it didn’t have any policies, and we’re now however long it’s been, with another by-election in a few weeks, and they still don’t have any policies. I feel like there was a point a few weeks after the Hartlepool byelection where Labour was kinda sorta trying to put some policies in the news, then stopped bothering again a week later.
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Jun 15, 2021 13:46
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The problem isn't a lack of policies, it's a lack of beliefs, values and convictions. Not having those makes coming up with policies hard...
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Jun 15, 2021 14:02
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sinky posted:lol that the BBC article fails to mention that Cressida Dick has been personally censured about this. I don't think I've ever seen Cressida Dick mentioned in a paragraph that didn't also include the words "corruption" or "incompetence" But I suppose they can't find another senior police officer who that isn't true of to replace her.
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Jun 15, 2021 14:12
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u brexit ukip it posted:I feel like there was a point a few weeks after the Hartlepool byelection where Labour was kinda sorta trying to put some policies in the news, then stopped bothering again a week later. Labor has actually out out some policy stuff, they just mention it once then never follow it up again. Also it's impossible to find any of this stuff on the Labour website so all their pronouncements just float into the ether
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Jun 15, 2021 14:18
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Cressida Dick sounds like a disney villainess.
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Jun 15, 2021 14:23
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Pablo Bluth posted:The problem isn't a lack of policies, it's a lack of beliefs, values and convictions. Not having those makes coming up with policies hard... Yeah, someone like Corbyn or McDonnell's big strength wasn't that they were just good at coming up with policies, it's that they genuinely had an ideological position that wasn't wet centrism. They may only be relatively moderate democratic socialists when it comes down to it, but they clearly actually believe in something. While they did come up with some decent policies, I think we overplay the importance of individual stuff like that a little too much. Some of Corbyn's policies were popular and genuinely cool, but a lot of them were fairly unremarkable Miliband-ish ideas dressed up in a more radical rhetoric. That's not in itself a criticism, I think a certain official caution was probably wise at the time. Policies played a part but I think far more important was that he came across as someone not hollowed out by the dominant ideology of neoliberalism (whether or not people articulated it in precisely that way). I don't think it's an accident that he started to falter when Brexit nonsense forced him to start triangulating in a way he was clearly uncomfortable with, and which completely undermined that outsider legitimacy. Suddenly, he was just another out of touch politician. If he had stuck to his guns and been openly committed to Brexit as part of a left-wing critique of the EU, I genuinely think he might have won. I think Starmer could promise everything Corbyn did and more, and he'd still poo poo the bed completely, because he's so clearly aligned with the establishment and nakedly in the dull, technocratic tradition of New Labour. Nobody expects him to keep his word even if he does win. We'd get four years of late-Brown* style stagnation as he realised he had no real idea what he wanted to be in government for anyway, really, beyond that trying to get there had been his job. Starmer sees being PM as a promotion within the workplace of Westminster, not as a powerful position that he might utilise to enact genuine change. Corbyn could have made no firm policy commitments, and I think many of us - myself included - would have still voted for him on the basis that he was almost certainly planning to do more in power than he felt able to commit to. I'd have liked to have seen how things had gone had he openly been the far-left turbo Stalinist the media pretended he was, though. * That said, I have some sympathy for Brown, and lots of his work as a younger man on poverty is really pretty passionate. I'm not where the hell that radical student/academic had gone by the time he became PM, you'd have thought we'd have seen a glimmer of it at least. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 14:32 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 14:29
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Pablo Bluth posted:The problem isn't a lack of policies, it's a lack of beliefs, values and convictions. Not having those makes coming up with policies hard... It is this I think. Taking Corbyn as a person, his existing values make it possible to predict, or at least guess at, his views on any given subject. Let's say he's never heard of trans people, or GTR people - once you explain their existence to him, it's unlikely he'll turn out to be a raging bigot about just those people. This becomes a bit harder with the wider party - it can end up with people projecting their own views onto the institution based on its other pronouncements, or the qualities of its top people, as I believe happened during Corbyn's leadership. I know ronya's always quick to jump in with a "well actually" about the specific manifesto policies, but the overall impression projected was one of being much more left-wing and progressive than any Labour in young people's lifetimes - and that's what got the enthusiasm going. Even some very broad-strokes expressions of values would go a long way towards arresting the current freefall of Starmailurebour - not vague waffle (which they're already doing), but specific pronouncements in enough areas that they create a force-field of progressiveness. Kick out the TERFs, hammer home that everything Patel says is terrible, big up both the NHS success and the government failure in the pandemic, stuff like that. The problem being, they don't agree with those things I just said. So they can't. E: ^^^ Snap  And yes, Brexit fits too, in that Corbyn's view of the EU can be intuited from his explicit statements (7/10) and his past words and actions, and neither the Brexiters nor the Fubpees liked what they saw.
Bobstar fucked around with this message at 14:36 on Jun 15, 2021 |
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Jun 15, 2021 14:31
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Starmer could promise fully automated luxury communism, and by the end of the week the Guardian would have talked him down to means tested budget utilitarianism.
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Jun 15, 2021 14:33
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ThomasPaine posted:I don't think it's an accident that he started to falter when Brexit nonsense forced him to start triangulating in a way he was clearly uncomfortable with, and which completely undermined that outsider legitimacy. Suddenly, he was just another out of touch politician. If he had stuck to his guns and been openly committed to Brexit as part of a left-wing critique of the EU, I genuinely think he might have won. Hindsight obviously but the attempts to essentially overturn the Brexit referendum result from people in the centre and in the left are one of the biggest mistakes of recent times. Pulling labour into a weak remain position and the threat of remain voters abandoning the party if they supported a leftist Brexit destroyed the party at those elections and changed nothing. The EU is such a stupid hill to end up dying on too. The result was never going to be overturned because it would be too destabilising for everyone and if Labour had been able to clearly support Brexit, but with the intent of using it to begin a bunch of leftist reforms and renovation, then they had a genuine shot at being unifying and winning a good victory.
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Jun 15, 2021 14:45
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