@Lloyd2084 said: @glasshalffull
You are asserting there is moral equivalence between the strategy of Thatcher and the impact of the policies on the mining communities etc to the few incidents of people celebrating her demise.
Tell me, what harm was caused by those celebrating her death? I agree it was on poor taste, but this really is false equivalence.
I was asserting no such thing. I was merely pointing out that hateful, spiteful behaviour and language are not solely confined to followers of one particular political party.
I suspect that those who celebrated Thatcher’s death caused a great deal of hurt to her surviving family, friends and colleagues.
@Lloyd2084 said: @glasshalffull
You are asserting there is moral equivalence between the strategy of Thatcher and the impact of the policies on the mining communities etc to the few incidents of people celebrating her demise.
Tell me, what harm was caused by those celebrating her death? I agree it was on poor taste, but this really is false equivalence.
I was asserting no such thing. I was merely pointing out that hateful, spiteful behaviour and language are not solely confined to followers of one particular political party.
I suspect that those who celebrated Thatcher’s death caused a great deal of hurt to her surviving family, friends and colleagues.
All sides have a handful of idiots @glasshalffull. Perhaps not to focus too much attention on them and certainly not allow them to divert us from scrutinising the performance of the Government.
Would you agree, with a non party political bias, that the Government's handling of this crisis has been disappointing and that worryingly their performance seems to be deteriorating culminating in the shambles of last nights announcements?
@DevC said:
All sides have a handful of idiots @glasshalffull. Perhaps not to focus too much attention on them and certainly not allow them to divert us from scrutinising the performance of the Government.
I didn't watch the speech, but read the summary of the changes on the BBC. I posted my understanding on social media recognising that the detail was to be published today, and was told I had got it wrong and the press had got it wrong/making things up, by somebody who had heard the whole speech. Dominic Raab this morning agreed with me, but given the importance of social interaction for single people and those separated from family - why didn't these messages get heard? Its almost as if the priority was to make a speech not the content of the speech.
The lack of clarity in the speech, guidance and follow up communications is appalling given the utmost gravity of the situation, and that people’s health and livelihoods are at stake.
I certainly believe that things could have been handled and communicated much better and I agree that yesterday’s broadcast was extremely poor and confusing.
However, none of us have been party to the advice that the government has received from the experts. The Americans have a wonderful phrase to describe people who are wise after the event: ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ and that’s very relevant in this debate. I didn’t realise that the UK had so many amateur biologists!
I still believe that much of the criticism has been politically motivated. I think it was Malone, whose posts are always balanced and without rancour, who said that if the PM announced that he’d become the first person to discover a vaccine for Covid-19, some people would still be demanding that he resign for not finding it earlier
Boris's speech yesterday was just another part of the embarrassing wartime rhetoric. He wanted to deliver something powerful and emotive that would make people remember him as a Churchillian leader.
Not only did he fail to do that, he also failed to deliver any real substance whatsoever.
@DevC said:
Not sure that one obscure union official and an actress is quite sufficient to support your phrase > @glasshalffull said:
"indeed we’ve seen prominent leftist figures publicly saying that they wished Boris Johnson had died during this current crisis."
Obscure union official? He’s number two in one of the biggest and most powerful unions in the country so you can hardy describe him as obscure. As for the actress, the BBC has given her a national platform to express her views so with that comes a level of responsibility.
Why get hung up on turning this into a partisan matter? Criticism is either valid or not.
Yesterday's statement was an absolute shambles and a complete failure to communicate clearly to a public is desperate need of clear guidance.
Which way I voted in the last election is completely irrelevant to me being able to make that judgment.
Moreover, people - myself included - desperately want the govt to handle this in the best way possible because not doing so costs people their lives. You'd have to be a psychopath to revel in a govt failure at this time.
If people are critical of the govt it's because they want as few people to die of this awful virus as possible.
@glasshalffull said:
I certainly believe that things could have been handled and communicated much better and I agree that yesterday’s broadcast was extremely poor and confusing.
However, none of us have been party to the advice that the government has received from the experts. The Americans have a wonderful phrase to describe people who are wise after the event: ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ and that’s very relevant in this debate. I didn’t realise that the UK had so many amateur biologists!
I still believe that much of the criticism has been politically motivated. I think it was Malone, whose posts are always balanced and without rancour, who said that if the PM announced that he’d become the first person to discover a vaccine for Covid-19, some people would still be demanding that he resign for not finding it earlier
The thing is with science, and the way the way scientific methodology works, is that it is published and peer reviewed. That’s literally how we build our knowledge. By criticising (in a non-pejorative way) we learn and improve the hypothesis for further testing.
Following the shadow SAGE group and watching their discussions has been illuminating. Different views are offered, reviewed and evaluated, but moreover it’s not hard to follow. You don’t need a PHD to follow a well made evidential argument.
Politicising the science has been extremely unhelpful and I suspect will be used a smokescreen come the inevitable enquiry.
@glasshalffull said:
I certainly believe that things could have been handled and communicated much better and I agree that yesterday’s broadcast was extremely poor and confusing.
However, none of us have been party to the advice that the government has received from the experts. The Americans have a wonderful phrase to describe people who are wise after the event: ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ and that’s very relevant in this debate. I didn’t realise that the UK had so many amateur biologists!
I still believe that much of the criticism has been politically motivated. I think it was Malone, whose posts are always balanced and without rancour, who said that if the PM announced that he’d become the first pers a vaccine for Covid-19, some people would still be demanding that he resign for not finding it earlier
What's the point in the advice if it can't or won't be communicated clearly? That's yer government's entire point of existing. And they're failing
Thatcher killed communities and wrecked lives, and is still heralded as some sort of hero by some members the current Tory party, with her ideas x still being used, that's why she's still relevant
@eric_plant said:
Which way I voted in the last election is completely irrelevant to me being able to make that judgment.
I agree with everything you said apart from this line Eric. An awful lot of people who voted for this buffoon seem hell bent on trying to justify that decision by wilfully ignoring the spectacular mess he's made at every step of this crisis, and the (literally) thousands of people who have died because of his incompetence.
The UK accounts for 0.0859% of the global population, and as of today 11.21% of global COVID-19 deaths. Only the spectacular incompetence of an even bigger buffoon in Trump is keeping that as low as it is.
1/8th of all COVID-19 deaths have happened on this tiny little island. That is a national disgrace and should be the biggest political scandal in generations but so many who voted for Johnson are concentrating on massaged figures about how many tests we're performing and patting each other on the back. A complete lack of empathy for human loss and suffering, just to feel justified in where they placed the cross on their ballot.
Also, in no way did I want Boris to die, wished him well at the time and meant it.
In hindsight though , it would have saved lives, if only to scare people into keeping lockdown, that would have been a clearer mesage from him than anything he's waffled since
For him and Wycombe, yes, but also for dozens of other clubs, hundreds of players, thousands of jobs linked to the industry, and hundreds of> @glasshalffull said:
I saw a quote from Barack Obama, a leader I’m sure we all admired and respected, that perfectly sums up this Us versus Them argument: ‘What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being tribal, being divided and seeing others as the enemy has become a stronger impulse in life.’ He puts it far more eloquently than I could.
Thanks, very interesting quotes from Obama, a bit more here in the Denver Post:
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama said, according to Yahoo News.
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.
I should find it remarkable that there have been so few influential people within football speaking up for the integrity of the game.
There is absolutely no integrity in voiding or ending any competition by arbitrary means with so many games still to be played.
It should be decided on the pitch and the pitch alone. We should wait until it is safe to do so, however long that wait is.
Sadly it is no longer about sporting integrity. Clubs squabbling with only self-interest as their motive has been unedifying and it will only get worse as the virus continues to spread. A combination of incompetence and greed will see clubs succumb to this crisis and it will be least they deserve.
@eric_plant said:
Which way I voted in the last election is completely irrelevant to me being able to make that judgment.
I agree with everything you said apart from this line Eric. An awful lot of people who voted for this buffoon seem hell bent on trying to justify that decision by wilfully ignoring the spectacular mess he's made at every step of this crisis, and the (literally) thousands of people who have died because of his incompetence.
The UK accounts for 0.0859% of the global population, and as of today 11.21% of global COVID-19 deaths. Only the spectacular incompetence of an even bigger buffoon in Trump is keeping that as low as it is.
1/8th of all COVID-19 deaths have happened on this tiny little island. That is a national disgrace and should be the biggest political scandal in generations but so many who voted for Johnson are concentrating on massaged figures about how many tests we're performing and patting each other on the back. A complete lack of empathy for human loss and suffering, just to feel justified in where they placed the cross on their ballot.
To play devil's advocate a little, do you not mean ‘known covid-19 deaths’? I’m not certain we have accurate international data from even countries such as Germany never mind Iran, China. N. Korea and the US. And how is a covid-19 death defined? My wife’s grandfather died in March from pneumonia, covid-19 and ‘frailty of old age’. The pneumonia began after a urine infection for which he was hospitalised and subsequently tested positive for covid-19. The UTI is not shown on his death certificate. I’m willing to bet his death would be attributed to covid-19 in some countries and not in others. So it could be that the UK has counted more deaths as ‘covid-19’ than other countries. The truer picture will emerge in tbe coming years as data on number of deaths above expected levels appears. My prediction is that the UK won’t look good in these numbers as I don’t think we’ve handled this well but when data is uncertain as it is now, to draw very solid conclusions, is grist to the mill of the conspiracy theorists and populists who promote the anti-expert rhetoric beloved of present-day extremists.
If I could, I would teach children not facts per se but how to evaluate evidence and understand uncertainties.
To play devil's advocate a little, do you not mean ‘known covid-19 deaths’? I’m not certain we have accurate international data from even countries such as Germany never mind Iran, China. N. Korea and the US. And how is a covid-19 death defined?
That is very true @Manboobs, and sadly anyone working in palliative care will tell you that we're massively under-reporting in the UK, with most estimates I've seen suggesting that around 40% more COVID-19 deaths are happening outside of our reporting. What if those other countries are reporting accurately and we're the only one that isn't? That would put us on 15.69% of global deaths.
So I figure reporting it on the actual figures announced by the government is probably the only fair way to do it. And that leaves us with one in every eight coronavirus deaths. To put that into perspective, if our actual population share matched our covid death share, we'd have a population of almost 9 billion people, six times the size of China.
However you chop the numbers up, it's a disgrace. The press in the rest of the world are reporting on the UK in absolute horror.
To play devil's advocate a little, do you not mean ‘known covid-19 deaths’? I’m not certain we have accurate international data from even countries such as Germany never mind Iran, China. N. Korea and the US. And how is a covid-19 death defined?
That is very true @Manboobs, and sadly anyone working in palliative care will tell you that we're massively under-reporting in the UK, with most estimates I've seen suggesting that around 40% more COVID-19 deaths are happening outside of our reporting. What if those other countries are reporting accurately and we're the only one that isn't? That would put us on 15.69% of global deaths.
So I figure reporting it on the actual figures announced by the government is probably the only fair way to do it. And that leaves us with one in every eight coronavirus deaths. To put that into perspective, if our actual population share matched our covid death share, we'd have a population of almost 9 billion people, six times the size of China.
However you chop the numbers up, it's a disgrace. The press in the rest of the world are reporting on the UK in absolute horror.
I'm not sure any nation is reporting or actually able to report the true levels of deaths caused by this 'devilish' virus (another of Johnson's teams carefully inserted words to create a different narrative) so it is tough to know how we all compare.
The excellent interview with the stats man in Marr yesterday talked about a gap of 10,000 deaths in the UK last month comparing normal averages and adding known Covid deaths.
Comments
Not sure that one obscure union official and an actress is quite sufficient to support your phrase > @glasshalffull said:
"indeed we’ve seen prominent leftist figures publicly saying that they wished Boris Johnson had died during this current crisis."
I still celebrate Thatcher's death every year.
I was asserting no such thing. I was merely pointing out that hateful, spiteful behaviour and language are not solely confined to followers of one particular political party.
I suspect that those who celebrated Thatcher’s death caused a great deal of hurt to her surviving family, friends and colleagues.
I appreciate the clarity @glasshalffull, thank you.
All sides have a handful of idiots @glasshalffull. Perhaps not to focus too much attention on them and certainly not allow them to divert us from scrutinising the performance of the Government.
Would you agree, with a non party political bias, that the Government's handling of this crisis has been disappointing and that worryingly their performance seems to be deteriorating culminating in the shambles of last nights announcements?
Fully agree @DevC
I didn't watch the speech, but read the summary of the changes on the BBC. I posted my understanding on social media recognising that the detail was to be published today, and was told I had got it wrong and the press had got it wrong/making things up, by somebody who had heard the whole speech. Dominic Raab this morning agreed with me, but given the importance of social interaction for single people and those separated from family - why didn't these messages get heard? Its almost as if the priority was to make a speech not the content of the speech.
The lack of clarity in the speech, guidance and follow up communications is appalling given the utmost gravity of the situation, and that people’s health and livelihoods are at stake.
I certainly believe that things could have been handled and communicated much better and I agree that yesterday’s broadcast was extremely poor and confusing.
However, none of us have been party to the advice that the government has received from the experts. The Americans have a wonderful phrase to describe people who are wise after the event: ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ and that’s very relevant in this debate. I didn’t realise that the UK had so many amateur biologists!
I still believe that much of the criticism has been politically motivated. I think it was Malone, whose posts are always balanced and without rancour, who said that if the PM announced that he’d become the first person to discover a vaccine for Covid-19, some people would still be demanding that he resign for not finding it earlier
Boris's speech yesterday was just another part of the embarrassing wartime rhetoric. He wanted to deliver something powerful and emotive that would make people remember him as a Churchillian leader.
Not only did he fail to do that, he also failed to deliver any real substance whatsoever.
I rest my case.
You’d have a fair point, if Boris announced he had discovered the vaccine and then people demanded he resign. But neither part is realistic.
People are critical because it’s been a horrible mess from the start which has led to large numbers of unnecessary deaths.
Why get hung up on turning this into a partisan matter? Criticism is either valid or not.
Yesterday's statement was an absolute shambles and a complete failure to communicate clearly to a public is desperate need of clear guidance.
Which way I voted in the last election is completely irrelevant to me being able to make that judgment.
Moreover, people - myself included - desperately want the govt to handle this in the best way possible because not doing so costs people their lives. You'd have to be a psychopath to revel in a govt failure at this time.
If people are critical of the govt it's because they want as few people to die of this awful virus as possible.
The thing is with science, and the way the way scientific methodology works, is that it is published and peer reviewed. That’s literally how we build our knowledge. By criticising (in a non-pejorative way) we learn and improve the hypothesis for further testing.
Following the shadow SAGE group and watching their discussions has been illuminating. Different views are offered, reviewed and evaluated, but moreover it’s not hard to follow. You don’t need a PHD to follow a well made evidential argument.
Politicising the science has been extremely unhelpful and I suspect will be used a smokescreen come the inevitable enquiry.
What's the point in the advice if it can't or won't be communicated clearly? That's yer government's entire point of existing. And they're failing
Thatcher killed communities and wrecked lives, and is still heralded as some sort of hero by some members the current Tory party, with her ideas x still being used, that's why she's still relevant
I agree with everything you said apart from this line Eric. An awful lot of people who voted for this buffoon seem hell bent on trying to justify that decision by wilfully ignoring the spectacular mess he's made at every step of this crisis, and the (literally) thousands of people who have died because of his incompetence.
The UK accounts for 0.0859% of the global population, and as of today 11.21% of global COVID-19 deaths. Only the spectacular incompetence of an even bigger buffoon in Trump is keeping that as low as it is.
1/8th of all COVID-19 deaths have happened on this tiny little island. That is a national disgrace and should be the biggest political scandal in generations but so many who voted for Johnson are concentrating on massaged figures about how many tests we're performing and patting each other on the back. A complete lack of empathy for human loss and suffering, just to feel justified in where they placed the cross on their ballot.
I’m not convinced @glasshalffull would be equally keen to defend a Labour government that were responsible for the deaths of thousands.
Also, in no way did I want Boris to die, wished him well at the time and meant it.
In hindsight though , it would have saved lives, if only to scare people into keeping lockdown, that would have been a clearer mesage from him than anything he's waffled since
For him and Wycombe, yes, but also for dozens of other clubs, hundreds of players, thousands of jobs linked to the industry, and hundreds of> @glasshalffull said:
Thanks, very interesting quotes from Obama, a bit more here in the Denver Post:
“What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty,” Obama said, according to Yahoo News.
“It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government,” he said.
Even the Daily Mail is taking the piss. Bad news for any Tory.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8304985/Sneak-Shout-Virus-Run-Britons-mock-Boris-Johnsons-new-stay-alert-slogan.html
points per game then...
Any 1 no when the fixtures come out?
I should find it remarkable that there have been so few influential people within football speaking up for the integrity of the game.
There is absolutely no integrity in voiding or ending any competition by arbitrary means with so many games still to be played.
It should be decided on the pitch and the pitch alone. We should wait until it is safe to do so, however long that wait is.
Sadly it is no longer about sporting integrity. Clubs squabbling with only self-interest as their motive has been unedifying and it will only get worse as the virus continues to spread. A combination of incompetence and greed will see clubs succumb to this crisis and it will be least they deserve.
Gasroom should start it's own political party.... would have the country sorted in no time
Southend's chairman wants the season voided in the name of integrity. You have to laugh.
To play devil's advocate a little, do you not mean ‘known covid-19 deaths’? I’m not certain we have accurate international data from even countries such as Germany never mind Iran, China. N. Korea and the US. And how is a covid-19 death defined? My wife’s grandfather died in March from pneumonia, covid-19 and ‘frailty of old age’. The pneumonia began after a urine infection for which he was hospitalised and subsequently tested positive for covid-19. The UTI is not shown on his death certificate. I’m willing to bet his death would be attributed to covid-19 in some countries and not in others. So it could be that the UK has counted more deaths as ‘covid-19’ than other countries. The truer picture will emerge in tbe coming years as data on number of deaths above expected levels appears. My prediction is that the UK won’t look good in these numbers as I don’t think we’ve handled this well but when data is uncertain as it is now, to draw very solid conclusions, is grist to the mill of the conspiracy theorists and populists who promote the anti-expert rhetoric beloved of present-day extremists.
If I could, I would teach children not facts per se but how to evaluate evidence and understand uncertainties.
That is very true @Manboobs, and sadly anyone working in palliative care will tell you that we're massively under-reporting in the UK, with most estimates I've seen suggesting that around 40% more COVID-19 deaths are happening outside of our reporting. What if those other countries are reporting accurately and we're the only one that isn't? That would put us on 15.69% of global deaths.
So I figure reporting it on the actual figures announced by the government is probably the only fair way to do it. And that leaves us with one in every eight coronavirus deaths. To put that into perspective, if our actual population share matched our covid death share, we'd have a population of almost 9 billion people, six times the size of China.
However you chop the numbers up, it's a disgrace. The press in the rest of the world are reporting on the UK in absolute horror.
I'm not sure any nation is reporting or actually able to report the true levels of deaths caused by this 'devilish' virus (another of Johnson's teams carefully inserted words to create a different narrative) so it is tough to know how we all compare.
The excellent interview with the stats man in Marr yesterday talked about a gap of 10,000 deaths in the UK last month comparing normal averages and adding known Covid deaths.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/884171/FINAL_6.6637_CO_HMG_C19_Recovery_FINAL_110520_v2_WEB__1_.pdf
Step 2 (no earlier than June 1)
**Permitting cultural and sporting events to take place behind closed-doors for broadcast,
while avoiding the risk of large-scale social contact.
**