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Honestly I feel like one of the big takeaways from covid has been how much it has forced relatively privileged people in the west to acknowledge their own mortality, and scrambled their brains in the process. Like, I get it, covid is scary. It can be a real bitch and yeah, it can kill you especially if you're old or otherwise vulnerable. But lockdown was always a public health measure designed to stop hospitals being overwhelmed. There was (is?) a lot of virus going around, and lots of people were always going to get sick as a result, but only a tiny minority died - numbers not really altogether worse than from other causes. It's poo poo but people die. But yeah, lockdown was necessary to stop the hospitals being overwhelmed, and I do understand the anxiety of the whole thing - I certainly felt it. Anyway, what I'm getting to is that now we have a solid vaccine rollout and everyone who wants one has been offered one, but I know so many people who are still losing their minds about getting on buses or whatever. I genuinely don't get it! You've had a vaccine that reduces covid's likelihood of killing you from 'very unlikely' to 'almost zero'. And yet you're still refusing to leave the house you're so terrified of catching it? And you're getting mad at other people trying to get back to a semblance of normality? I just... if you've had the vaccine what more can you do? You're basically fine. It turns covid into a potentially unpleasant but basically harmless cold. I fundamentally do not understand why anyone is remotely worried anymore. Yes, it might still kill you if you're very unlucky. You can also just die from a thousand other things on a daily basis. You might get cancer or fall over or crash a car or whatever. But for some reason you obsess over covid and covid alone, and insist on this quasi-wartime attitude of stoic self-denial and permanent isolation until what, we have 0 cases globally, as if that's even possible. And all that for something that, assuming you're vaccinated, is less of a threat than slipping in the shower? Idk, this just feels like a lot of people learning for the first time that you can just... die, and being completely unable to process the reality of that. Covid was what prompted that thought process, so covid will always be this terrifying existential thread. Maybe this attitude stems from the influence of a neoliberal ideology that holds the only important decision as one that directly affects you, the individual. They cannot recognise public health measures for the collective policies they are, and instead insist on perceiving them as there to protect them personally from this big bad evil, which persists now even as its actual threat dwindles. I'm thinking out loud here I guess but it's interesting. Since having the vaccine I stopped giving a single poo poo about covid despite being technically considered vulnerable, and it's wild to me that there are people who still refuse to go to public spaces after nearly two years despite being at essentially no additional risk than they otherwise would be. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 11:48 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 11:46
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OwlFancier posted:I can't say my reticence about "going back to normal" is really motivated by the probability of myself getting sick, although I certainly object to being told to put myself at risk for poo poo pay and just because a bunch of loving noncing toffs want to have horse racing or whatever the gently caress. But broadly all the measures are for the benefit of other people, yes I've had both vaccines and I'm not that old so it's unlikely to effect me, but that also means I could conceivably go about infecting a load of other people and not know about it. And isolation/masks/basic hygiene isn't really very difficult. Oh yeah but that's a different issue and one that persists outside of pandemic times. Employers will never give a poo poo about your wellbeing. ButI know people who are losing their mind for purely personal safety reasons. I see then pointing at a crowded tube train and making a face as if it matters? Who cares! You're vaccinated! Your chance of dying of covid is probably less than winning the lottery! On infecting other people, the way I see it now is everyone who wanted a vaccine has had one. If you refused and get sick I'm sorry but that's kinda on you. I don't mind keeping masks and whatever for shops I guess because it's nbd, but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend another winter in the flat staring forlornly into the darkness. I was down in England last weekend and while up here in Scotland a good number of people seem to still wear masks etc basically no one did down there. I gave up on the idea very quickly because gently caress it, I'm doing it for the benefit of others not myself and if everyone else is telling me they couldn't give a poo poo about showing me any consideration I'll return the sentiment. I did put one on where even a few other people had out of politeness to them, but that happened surprisingly rarely!
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Oct 7, 2021 12:05
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Oh dear me posted:You say you get this, but the rest of your post ignores it. Some of us are old, vulnerable, or in need of hospital beds for other reasons, and some of us just care about people who are. It's cool that you've considered your own mortality but I think you're deluded if you believe there aren't a significant number of people who haven't. In the west we are completely insulated from death and encouraged not to think about it, up until the point we get very sick or someone we love dies or whatever. That's pretty undeniable. Anyway, my point was that after vaccination even old and vulnerable people are at no more risk from covid than they are from generally existing. Some people will still die, but some people always still die. It's a horrible thing, but permanent self-imposed house arrest for the entire population is not a proportionate response. With the vaccination rate we have, covid is simply not the public health danger it once was. It's just another lovely virus that makes people sick, and like most other lovely viruses some people get unlucky. I mean fine, keep masks and whatever, they're very low effort, but until we start getting serious (and unlikely) spikes in the hospitalisation/death (not case) rates there's zero reason to adopt any draconian measures or worry much more about things than you usually would. Also, the bogeyman 'vaccine busting' variant is not terrible threat we think it is. That isn't have vaccines work. A variant might be more virulent, or might cause proportionally worse symptoms, but rendering the vaccines completely useless would require one hell of a mutation, which is astronomically improbable. You're far more likely to get strains like Delta, which make them marginally less effective, but we're talking a few percentage points here or there. I'm really not trying to be dismissive or callous here, I just think people have trained themselves - quite rightly - to be so cautious, that now they're unable to acknowledge that the realistic danger of covid in the UK is a fraction of what it was this time last year. Bobby Deluxe posted:Throughout this entire pandemic your posting has been loving unbearable, and this is a perfect example of why. The first statement is absolutely stunning in its tone deafness to a thread which has several posters who've lost loved ones or have loved ones who are still at risk of long-term damage even post vaccination. It's in denial about the scale of the deaths not just in this country, but worldwide. But more than that, it's loving heartless, and yet again you're showing that you're fine with people dying so you can go back to the pub. My posting is always unbearable, but you're putting a lot of words into my mouth here. Public health measures are by definition judgement calls that, yes, have to balance 'acceptable' deaths against wider social impact. It's not fun but it's absolutely essential. That doesn't mean every individual death isn't a tragedy, but if you follow your argument to its conclusion none of us leave the house ever again because absolutely everything we do has the potential to harm or kill someone else in the long-run. Short term draconian measures are sometimes acceptable, and I think in the context of covid they were, but maintaining them indefinitely is just completely unfeasible and, arguably, ethically wrong. You seem to think this means I'm anti-mask, anti-isolation when sick etc, but that's not what I've said. What I'm frustrated at are they people arguing that we need to once again close everything, ban travel, etc etc, and do so potentially for years to come. Doing that would do far more harm to us as a society than not doing so would with the rates of vaccination that we have. Fwiw I said nothing about people being forced to do anything because of work - that's bad pandemic or not - and yes, UC cuts are shocking. I feel like you've built a pretty serious strawman around my actual point here honestly. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 13:14 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 13:02
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Lunar Suite posted:The majority of current cases are now in young adults and children. Your premise is flawed. In which way does this invalidate or even have any relevance to anything I said? quote:Nobody suggested permanent house arrest - you're constructing a strawman. People are suggesting wearings masks, making vaccines mandatory, and reducing the chance of another mutant variant arising. I'm not constructing a strawman, this is an argument I have seen people make. I never said anyone ITT had done so. (Mandatory vaccination is a dangerous precedent tbh but that's a different point entirely and I feel opening a second front might be foolish right now) quote:Please calculate the number of people affected by a "few percentage points" across the entire UK population. Show your working, and state the number of deaths you find acceptable. iirc the effectiveness is still >70% which is more than enough to do the job a vaccine is supposed to do, and much more effective than seasonal flu vaccines.
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Oct 7, 2021 13:21
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Dabir posted:You can "see people make" any argument you like, that doesn't mean it's what you're arguing against here. All I said initially was I'd seen people make the argument (elsewhere) and I thought it was a bad take. Idk why anyone ITT assumed I was attacking them for their very reasonable desire to keep basic precautionary measures like masks.
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Oct 7, 2021 13:29
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Spangly A posted:Mandatory vaccination is a dangerous precedent. First they made us get vaccines to eradicate dangerous illnesses. Then they made us get vaccinated to enter any given country with dangerous endemic diseases not found locally. Now they're making us get vaccinated for a dangerous pandemic whose predecessor had a variant strain with near 50% mortality. Where does it end??? I was more thinking about making any medical procedure legally compulsory, because you absolutely do not have to look too far back into the past to see how sketchy that can be, not even in the really obvious examples like WW2 - see the contagious diseases acts in 19th C Britain for one fun example. Even with the best will in the world no medication is without risk and you're always going to get your thalidomide experiences, there's a reason informed consent is such a huge deal in medical ethics and it's very dodgy to override that in 99.9999% of cases. Now that doesn't mean I'm against vaccines being required to access certain public spaces or unis or workplaces or whatever else. You choose not to have it, you choose to isolate yourself, fine, but you can't have your cake and eat it. But that doesn't mean someone should be able to come round your house and insist on giving you an injection whether you like it or not.
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Oct 7, 2021 13:39
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namesake posted:Bodily autonomy is always a limited, socially mediated right. There are absolutely conditions and limitations put on a persons right to be and to do things with their body and that's not a bad thing inherently. Simply existing in a society means you have a impact on the collective and that should burden society with responsibility to the individual and the individual with responsibility to society. If a person is existing in a way to cause harm or risk to others then society at large is completely within its rights to force corrective action against the individual, the biological, unknowing nature of the threat doesn't change that. This is of course a very very big topic in itself but when you boil it down while I'm not the biggest fan of foucault I share his instinctive caution towards anything that reinforces coercive power structures, and medicine absolutely counts as one of those. It's not the vaccination itself that's the issue, it's what making it mandatory represents at an ideological level.
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Oct 7, 2021 14:13
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Lunar Suite posted:You only stated the health of the elderly as reasons to continue public health measures (which you characterised as "everyone stays home forever"). If you were considering a more broad or nuanced view, it may be helpful to communicate it in its entirety. Schools are I admit a really tricky one. I personally would have suggested they stay closed longer, or reopened far more carefully. Same with the early easing of restrictions in England while the majority of the under 30s still hadn't been offered a vaccine, because of course you then get covid running through a largely unvaccinated younger population at school/going out to bars etc, who generally don't get super sick, but might have long-term complications. I guess until we see the long term data on long-covid we can't say what the impact has been. Really we should have started vaccinating kids too as soon as the resources were there. My overall point was about the vaccinated adult population though, and public spaces. I agree 100% that the government absolutely acted irresponsibly when it came to schoolkids. Also as I said I have seen and met too many people who are seriously advocating for another complete lockdown and I only came here to complain about that dumb take. I know it's hyperbolic which is why I brought it up, in the same way people post insane tweets that they obviously don't think anyone ITT agrees with. Spangly A posted:It's not a big argument because the law isn't a big slider you have to pull down to "mandatory vaccines" while shrugging off all consequences. "what if bad people then do a thing" has never been a worthwhile argument because authoritarians don't care about excuses in the first place. Informed consent in bioethics is absolutely a big topic jesus That said I think we're arguing past each other a bit here. Making anything compulsory is by definition an authoritarian policy, and the potential danger isn't that some individual villain might abuse the power, it's the power itself The Ebola example you use isn't comparing like for like - Ebola is insane transmissible and ridiculously lethal. Obviously you shoot that one person who is actively putting every single person around them in imminent danger. Covid is hardly the same thing, and the whole point of the vaccination programme is to achieve a certain threshold of collective immunity, not avert that kind of isolated high-risk crisis. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Oct 7, 2021 |
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Oct 7, 2021 14:29
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Spangly A posted:Covid killed 3x the number of people in the UK, in one year, than ebola infected in the entire 2013-2016 West African pandemic. Where did I minimise anything? Stop putting words into my mouth. Weighing up current vs historical risk and the value of different public health measures is not minimising anything. The pandemic has been extremely poo poo. I have literally not suggested otherwise at any point. Are you really telling me a known active carrier of ebola in an almost entirely unvaccinated population is even remotely the same thing as someone who might be active carrier of covid in an majority vaccinated one? You're comparing apples and oranges. Ebola and covid are completely different ball games, and the former might not have the staying power but it absolutely needs way more strict containment because it's exponentially more deadly to people unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Bobby Deluxe posted:gently caress off. Solid point well made.
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Oct 7, 2021 15:05
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I'll stop putting words in your mouth when they stop coming out of it. Literally the only that even remotely could be read as minimising anything in the post you quoted is 'only a tiny minority died - numbers not really altogether worse than from other causes', which I agree was pretty badly worded. I was getting at the fact that proportionally, only a small percentage of infected people died, and there are lots of other diseases you can get with much worse odds. The issue with covid is how contagious it is. If it only spread at the rate your average seasonal virus does, it probably wouldn't have even made the news. The problem was the pressure on the health service, not the disease itself being exceptionally dangerous in individual cases. The rest of sections you bolded I stand by 100% because they refer to now, not to last year. And with vaccines, covid is essentially neutered as a serious threat. The vast majority of deaths occurred before we had 90% vaccination, and I am not minimising how awful that was, but it is simply not the situation we are currently in. Yes, even with vaccination some people will get very unlucky, but you can say the same for literally anything. Also ffs I've explicitly said that my initial post wasn't addressed to anyone ITT. If your idea of acceptable public health measures are 'encourage mask wearing, isolate when you're sick, try not to cough all over the milk in tescos etc etc' than we're not actually disagreeing about anything. Spangly A posted:If you get the idea that different things are different then stop trying to use slippery slopes and the spectre of ideology to criticise hypothetical vaccination policies fgs I do know where you're coming from, I'm just very mindful of the ways the medical profession has historically been used as an arm of state power. Also I think there's a pretty big distinction to be made between active intervention like mandatory vaccination and more passive legislation like mask/vaccine passport enforcement. I certainly don't have an issue with the latter in principle. There's something I hold very sacred about the right to bodily autonomy and the need to consent to anything anyone does to your physical being, which I find very difficult to just suspend out of pragmatism. Ideally we'd get round this with the carrot rather than the stick, lots of education, give people a little inventive to get vaccinated, the rest of it.
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Oct 7, 2021 15:53
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:67%. Not everyone has had their second shot yet, and we aren't yet vaccinating everyone who can transmit covid. Much higher. They recently updated the covid dashboard so that vaccination data reflects all people 12+. We're on about 85% first doses and just under 80% second, and obviously much much higher than that in vulnerable populations. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
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Oct 7, 2021 16:16
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fuctifino posted:And who else do those infected people come into contact with and infect? How many shop workers, transport workers or random passers by do they infect, and those new people infected, who do they then infect and carry on the chain? How many of those might be vulnerable, or have friends or relatives that they come into contact with who are vulnerable?.... If they're vaccinated they're not really classified as vulnerable anymore though, surely?
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Oct 7, 2021 17:03
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fuctifino posted:Those are now acceptable numbers, even for some in this thread now... apparently... and sadly... Fwiw I don't have exact stats but I do know a few people who work in hospitals and NHS management and their take is that the vast majority of the people dying at the moment are dumbass antivaxxers who refused the shots when they were offered months ago. Nothing really verifiable though so take it with a pinch of salt I guess.
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Oct 7, 2021 17:26
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I think people ITT are getting their wires crossed a bit about the distinction between personally meaningful and statistically meaningful. Obviously all deaths are tragedies, but that's not relevant to national public health policy, miserable though it is to make that kind of hardnosed analysis. If I died tomorrow in some freak accident involving shoving legos up my bum that would be a terrible tragedy for my family and my partner and my friends, but if the data showed that 99.999% of people who shoved legos up their bums in any year got away with a bit of light bleeding out of their rear end, no one would be immediately insisting all legos be banned forever.
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Oct 7, 2021 18:31
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Jakabite posted:Obviously we should all still be wearing masks and such. I don’t think anyone is disagreeing with that. But nothing is correct in that an individual case is not a significant bit of evidence - this is a lovely community but it is also a political debate thread in a debate forum. I don’t think they should be demonised for pointing out the public health policy is always a balance of QoL and people dying. There’s not really any way to say that without sounding callous, but it’s the nature of the beast. Yes this is essentially my take as well, and much more succinctly put.
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Oct 7, 2021 20:10
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It's not even so much that mandatory vaccination is a slippery slope, as such, it's that the very act of mandating medical procedures in itself comes with a lot of baggage. As twisto says there is a precedent for it, but that doesn't make it a self-evident good. Here's one good recent article that highlights some of the complexities and considerations surrounding this sort of stuff, concentrating on hesitancy in BAME populations https://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/vaccine-hesitancy-and-bame-populations
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Oct 7, 2021 20:38
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Whenever I read about it Portugal seems like such a cracking place to be, drat Turns out electing socialists actually makes life better for everyone, who knew
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Oct 7, 2021 21:24
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the sex ghost posted:Lot of chat about the euromillions at work today. Keep meaning to remember to win that Get a hot air balloon and drop stacks of notes into a crowd of people then loudly guffaw so hard your top hat threatens to fall off as they go wild, sipping hundred year old brandy and smoking the best Cuban cigar
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Oct 8, 2021 11:45
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Kinda wild thinking back to when Labour was actually very self-consciously the parliamentary wing of the much broader trade union movement, rig up a dynamo to Keir Hardie's corpse and we've solved the global energy crisis
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Oct 8, 2021 16:15
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learnincurve posted:Nah nah, *anyone* can do it. Don’t make this a class thing because it normalises the idea of the poor being bad with money Yeah my parents had a similar experience with my gran when she lost her marbles with dementia and had to be put in a care home. I want to be mad with them because it is just tax evasion plain and simple but it does feels like one of those things absolutely designed from the ground up to be abused. That said, if you own your house at all and are in a position to do this kind of sleight of hand, you're far from the bottom of the pile. Maybe that's the point.
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Oct 10, 2021 15:09
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Absolutely wild to me that there are people in this world who instead of calling the official number like a normal human would take a winning lottery ticket worth upwards of a million quid to their local spar and hand it over to the guy at the till, as if he's going to pay out the lot in rolls of twenties. Surprised this doesn't happen more often tbh: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/05/suspected-thief-of-winning-scratchcard-stopped-at-rome-airport
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Oct 10, 2021 18:41
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crispix posted:i enjoyed how outraged the middle clawwses got about mickey carroll back in the day I'm glad he wasn't my neighbour but I did lol quite a bit at the idea of him buying a house in proper jam and Jerusalem country and driving all the prim and proper old dears absolutely bananas by turning his back garden into a racetrack and having insane parties every night. Though iirc he was legit a wrong'un and ended up funding some dodgy loyalist paramilitaries in NI or something?
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Oct 11, 2021 10:07
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keep punching joe posted:So the William Gibson essay on Singapore (Disneyland with the death penalty) is still accurate today. You occasionally get big old rural manor houses for sale for way less than you'd expect them to cost, I think I saw one around Dumbarton going for around 300k a few years ago. I imagine they don't really sell because they're miles from anywhere and cost an absolute fortune to maintain. I always kinda liked the idea of pitching in with a group of friends and leading a surreal 18th century existence, lounging about this decrepit giant mansion where people just turn up and stay for months on end, and hopefully there's no scandal and nobody gets murdered prompting an intense investigation in which everyone is suspect and much dirty laundry gets aired. Yeah if I won the euro millions I'd probably buy one of those and fill it with secret passages and treasures and mysteries for someone down the line to figure out. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 11:34 on Oct 11, 2021 |
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Oct 11, 2021 11:32
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Grand designs is the toriest TV show that I just can't bring myself to dislike
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Oct 11, 2021 11:37
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The really depressing thing is that all of this is a very obvious symptom of a government running on farts and hubris for over a decade and a decent opposition could almost guarantee the next election, but Labour no longer has a drat clue what it's even for, politics is just a career option for well connected debate nerds and the red team is the one you pick if you're in a poor area. I think you can probably count the number of people in the commons who have actual beliefs about anything bigger than themselves on one hand. This all feels like a political consensus about to collapse, but it... won't. It'll just shamble on from crisis to crisis and things will gradually get incrementally worse year after year until someone gets their loving act together or we all die, and one of the most tragic things - and I think something boomers in particular really do struggle to understand - is that I and as far as I can tell a good portion of millenials and gen z'ers find it almost impossible to imagine anything improving much at all in our lifetimes. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Oct 12, 2021 |
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Oct 12, 2021 20:55
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I'm pretty sure this is what Thatcher meant when she said Blair was her greatest achievement lol
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Oct 12, 2021 21:01
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Had a look at Weetos again for old times sake and lol, she's still pumping out the takes https://twitter.com/francesweetman/status/1447885883202576386?s=20 She's always been TERF-adjacent iirc, being a HarryPotter Centrist, but christ she's not even bothering to hide it now. Quite impressive that she doesn't see the irony in: 1) Adamantly opposing harassment (read: people being mean towards) 'gender critical' academics who openly advocate for the removal of trans-rights and serve to give powerful cultural legitimacy to bigotry. 2) Losing the absolute plot at left-wingers she deems 'antisemitic', usually with zero evidence*, and actively participating in dogpiles sometimes to the point of trying to get people sacked. I feel like, just maybe, she might be being a little selective in her outrage! *Or with 'evidence' that actually stems from her own plentiful stores of racism - i.e. 'Bankers are shits you say? Well, guess what, Hitler, if you kill all the moneylenders you'd be doing another holocaust because they're all Jewish! I am very smart and a heroically brave warrior for racial justice.') that's all the weetposting I'll be doing do not worry, just seemed a succinct example of this kind of cynical garbage
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Oct 13, 2021 00:51
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Tesseraction posted:God drat it Thom it's been over a year since I regularly checked this thread and you have to post this when I'm starting to return? It's my only relapse in a long time 
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Oct 13, 2021 10:29
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WhatEvil posted:It was a few pages back now people were talking about good places to live when stinking rich. I liked vancouver but North American cities in general make me feel uncomfortable, idk why. I think it's the grid system and lack of any pedestrian infrastructure honestly, as well as in the USA the moderate chance of being shot anytime you leave the house. Vancouver doesn't have the last one of those but still... Impressive landscape around the place though. The pacific northwest is pure twin peaks country and it's beautiful.
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Oct 13, 2021 10:49
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fuctifino posted:loving lol. GBNews just happens to be there capturing it all. I think there's serious odds on it. ER had their moments but these guys seem designed from the ground up to do the dumbest most counterproductive things. Coincidental that no-one had even heard of these guys a month or two ago, like they just appeared out of thin air.
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Oct 13, 2021 14:40
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JeremoudCorbynejad posted:ThomasPaine I found your next PhD project One is enough jfc
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Oct 13, 2021 15:24
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feedmegin posted:Isnt that..fatal for non-diabetic people? Depends how much is a lot and how much coke you can chug before puking, I guess e: If someone ever tries to kill me you'd better believe there's getting a full 100 units of the good stuff. They'll probably still murder me but let me tell you they'll be having a terrible day a few hours later.
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Oct 13, 2021 16:04
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If the killer turns out to be a left-winger we're never going to hear the end of it lmao What's that, who killed Jo Cox? Ohhh, mental illness was it, of course.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:18
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On one hand, this is going to be spun into mass outrage against the 'tolerant left' (bad), all the sensibles will merrily go along with it (bad), and the narrative will stick where it counts, every further pushing our political system beyond the remotest chance of salvage (very bad). On the other, a tory got stabbed up (good), then couldn't be saved in time because of tory policy (hilarious). So who can say whether it is a good or a bad thing, I guess.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:27
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https://twitter.com/DrFrancesRyan/status/1449018185383022592?s=20 This tweet got me thinking a bit about what MPs actually are. Can they really be described as 'public servants' just 'going to work', as if they worked at the post office? It almost implies a sense of neutrality which I'm not sure is particularly helpful - there are very good reasons why a Tory MP might be actively despised by someone because their job is by definition political, they collectively determine the whole fabric of our society and commit acts of violence many times more destructive than an isolated knife attack every single day. There are going to be consequences for doing that, of course their are. That's not necessarily a bad thing. The idea that politicians should just be left to 'do their job' in peace is asinine when 'their job' is actively killing people. Perhaps MPs not being scared of their constituents is actually more of a problem here.
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Oct 15, 2021 15:42
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William Bear posted:He's Catholic, but the meeting was at a Methodist church. The first two decades of the 21st C are currently paralleling the first two decades of the 20th C to an incredible extent, so I'm sure some great stuff is in store for us in the 2030s and 2040s
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Oct 15, 2021 15:45
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Nothingtoseehere posted:Sure, but the entire point of democracy is to have methods of settling political disputes without violence - That if you have political groups compete over the popular vote they don't get the knives out and start conflicts that wrap up alot of other people in their wake. A healthy democracy is one where political classes are confident they aren't at risk of violence in their competitions for power. The problem is the fix is "stop doing politics that kills people, and they might stop killing you in return" which is not something the Tories want to hear or bargain with. I think that it's fair to expect physical violence to be exceptional, but I do wonder whether we might have significantly more co-operative MPs if they knew that there was a non-zero chance of being picked up and chucked off a bridge if they hosed off too many people namesake posted:Thats a little bit silly - we have no world war in europe parallel at all which is a huge omission. Ha, I know, I'm mostly kidding. Though you could argue the various wars in the middle east are a decent enough parallel. On everything else though... financial crash, pandemic, an elite class that thinks it's completely invulnerable, political polarisation. That said obviously very little chance of any popular uprising (in whichever direction) happening in established, developed nations these days because the state's monopoly on violence is far tighter than it was back in first decades of the 20th C. Much though I like to fantasise about it I'm really not sure how a revolutionary movement would build itself any meaningful power base in 2021, even if it enjoyed a good amount of public sympathy, given the level of surveillance we're under at all times. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 15:53
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Ginette Reno posted:In the US when people get upset they just go shoot up grocery stores. I guess in the UK they do it better? MPs get very little personal protection as standard, and spend a good deal of their time at local offices in whichever bumfuck town that's usually just a standard commercial unit on the high street, alone from your usual bookies and pubs and charity shops and takeaways.* They also have regular surgeries where they mingle pretty freely with whoever turns up. I imagine the police keep a bit of an eye on them and respond quite quickly to any disturbance, but it would not be difficult to attack someone as today proves. I think only govt ministers have a permanent security detail, and maybe even then only the more senior ones * A funny little quirk I noticed when I lived in Glasgow was that one of the local (Tory) MSP's offices in Maryhill gave zero indication of which party he represented. Usually they have the logo and stuff, but this was just a plain window with his name and 'MSP'. I imagine he knew he'd bankrupt himself replacing his windows ever other day if he openly had 'Conservative and Unionist Party' written up there lol. e: fb ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 16:15 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 16:12
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Yeah, it's quite frustrating that even usually on-point people are reverting to this kind of 'terrible tragedy, murdered for just doing his job, heartbreaking, so sad, couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke' bullshit. Why should I pretend to give a flying gently caress that some Tory nonce got killed?Bobby Deluxe posted:I've heard that Boris almost never does surgeries and gets various deputies and assistants to do it for him. I kind of always assumed the PM and most ministers would employ people to do their surgeries. Much though I hate Bojo et al, I do think it's a bit ridiculous that the head of government is expected to spent time listening to indignant pensioners in a village hall in Stoke or whatever, rather than, you know, doing important national-level stuff. ThomasPaine fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Oct 15, 2021 |
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Oct 15, 2021 16:25
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Honestly I suppose actual sitting MPs do probably need to go through the motions of paying their respects even if they hated the person.
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Oct 15, 2021 16:39
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