tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post3444509975731560841..comments2024-03-29T09:14:53.583+00:00Comments on All That Is Solid ...: Playing the Covid Blame GamePhilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06298147857234479278noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-63250784143554873092021-07-31T13:25:42.843+01:002021-07-31T13:25:42.843+01:00«A public health failure? Absolutely. But the poli...«<i>A public health failure? Absolutely. But the politics? Not so. [...] The Tories never let a crisis go to waste.</i>»<br /><br />There is subtle problem about this; the ruling parties in Scotland (SNP) and Wales (New New Labour) and in Ireland (both north and south) have adopted the the same strategy as the Conservatives in England, which has been recently well defined as "fatalistic liberalism":<br /><br />https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jul/27/british-government-covid-strategy-virus-incompetence-ignorance-pandemic<br />“In a report released last December, the cross-party joint committee on national security strategy condemned the government for having “failed seriously to consider how it might scale up testing, isolation and contact-tracing capabilities during a serious disease outbreak” [...] this governing approach, which we call “fatalistic liberalism”, allows it to place the blame on the mix of public behaviour and natural causes. Risk appears to be the consequence of personal choice – people can decide whether to wear a mask or whether to get vaccinated – not the result of policy decisions made at the top”<br /><br />Two of the main opposition parties at the UK level are the governing parties at the nation level and have adopted the same “<i>fatalistic liberalism</i>” as “<i>The Tories</i>”, and even the LibDems have been totally complicit (I don't know about the Greens).<br /><br />Even the "unaligned" article mentioned above does not dare to mention the 10-100 times difference that "fatalistic liberalism" makes, and in it the *only* criticism is to the Johnson government, not to the SNP government in Scotland or the New New Labour one in Wales, even if the public health and the NHS are devolved:<br /><br />https://www.publichealthscotland.scot/ https://phw.nhs.wales/<br />https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/118/1/16/1744498<br />“<i>Since devolution in 1998, the UK has had four increasingly distinct health systems, in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.</i>”<br /><br />«<i>The prospect of tens of thousands of young people contracting a debilitating illness, for some leading to life-long complications, and the chance of hundreds of more unnecessary deaths is no different.</i>»<br /><br />That is on the heads of Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon (and less explicitly Ed Davey) too. In this respect the "fatalistic liberalism" strategy of Boris Johnson has been a big political success, making most of the "opposition" his accomplices.<br /><br />“<i>There Is No Alternative</i>” is both prescriptive and descriptive. :-(Blissexnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-19171589943803236522021-07-28T13:04:02.208+01:002021-07-28T13:04:02.208+01:00When a government lies at the drop of a hat, can y...When a government lies at the drop of a hat, can you really blame people for not trusting them over jabs? Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-81180535248516650592021-07-27T16:58:21.943+01:002021-07-27T16:58:21.943+01:00«I am counting on China in the great war to come, ...«<i>I am counting on China in the great war to come, they could start with Australia. I mean if Australia can obliterate the natives and stock the land with white folk, then i don’t see why China shouldn’t repeat the process. In a few hundred years it will just be history</i>»<br /><br />In one of the truly great scifi stories ever, "Norstrilia" by Cordwainer Smith, which I think is high literature, in distant future after world wars 3, 4, 5 Australia and much of the rest of the world are depopulated and the only government remaining is that of China, and they take over the empty australian (the australians have moved to another planet and still have pictures of the queen in public places in the year 16,000) continent to build a megacity there, <br /><br />http://www.fourth-millennium.net/cordwainer-vr/aojou-nambien.html<br />http://www.fourth-millennium.net/cordwainer-vr/cs-index.html<br />https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norstrilia<br /><br />«<i>and we will happily watch their shit soaps.</i>»<br /><br />You can watch them now (with english subtitles), for example on Viki.com, and they are often of very good quality (but often the plot develops quite slowly), and also give some idea of life in China and their collective imagination. For example:<br /><br />https://www.viki.com/tv/36373c-love-o2o<br />https://www.viki.com/tv/36761c-standing-in-the-time<br />https://www.viki.com/tv/29908c-fifteen-years-of-waiting-for-migratory-birds<br />Blissexnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-227497914433186212021-07-27T15:56:41.583+01:002021-07-27T15:56:41.583+01:00«they haven’t had typhoid, measles, diphtheria, po...«<i>they haven’t had typhoid, measles, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, etc., etc. is because they were vaccinated as children, then there would be no rationale for not having the Covid-19 jab or the yearly flu vaccination.</i>»<br /><br />It is not quite as simple as that, the other vaccines are proven safe by a long track record, the newer ones aren't. In anything new there is always some risk if it is applied on a large scale.<br /><br />Because vaccines are not like most medicines: the latter are given only to the sick, so there is a clear case there for accepting risks and side effects, and they are few, vaccines are given to the healthy and everybody. So if there is some minority of the population that might have problems with them, trials are likely to miss them, but mass vaccination will affect all of them.<br /><br />This said in the particular case of SARS-CoViD-2 vaccines the case for vaccination is strong because:<br /><br />* There is a lot of experience with vaccines and CoronaVirus vaccines, trials however accelerated showed presumptive safety and efficacity, and mass vaccination so far has not filled the morgues or the hospitals.<br /><br />* In any case nothing has a zero death rate (and that includes *not* taking the vaccine), and there are plenty of things that are done because of other people's right to safety. For example the jackbooted thugs of collectivism force people to attend driving school and to MOT test their vehicles to minimize accidents involving people other than drivers, not just themselves, and the same collectivists put you in jail if you show up in public without a crotch covering because it would offend other people. Unfortunately there is that “<i>The individualisation of experience</i>” that the Conservatives, New Labour, SNP, LibDems are all agreed on.Blissexnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-28470201357794717952021-07-27T10:45:06.312+01:002021-07-27T10:45:06.312+01:00Wasn’t it Stalin, in response to those who said Tr...Wasn’t it Stalin, in response to those who said Trotsky fought well during the October uprising, who said, everyone fights well when the opposition are divided, demoralised and have no rear guard!<br /><br />The same applies to the Tories handling of the politics methinks.<br /><br />They have a primarily middle class electorate, predisposed to their grotesque morality, a media that is lets be charitable and say, sympathetic to them and an opposition that tries to ape them when ut isn’t tearing itself apart.<br /><br />“Why aren't younger people queuing around the block for their jabs?”<br /><br />Because they are feral, decadent, obnoxious and hedonistic cunts in the main, who are the epitome of what neo liberalism means in practice, how centuries of red in tooth and claw capitalism debases human beings.<br /><br />I am counting on China in the great war to come, they could start with Australia. I mean if Australia can obliterate the natives and stock the land with white folk, then i don’t see why China shouldn’t repeat the process. In a few hundred years it will just be history, and we will happily wtach their shit soaps.<br />BCFGnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4486641877026778105.post-28241389645929225122021-07-27T08:21:25.716+01:002021-07-27T08:21:25.716+01:00Whilst all you have written is true, I also believ...Whilst all you have written is true, I also believe that vaccine hesitancy reflects a worrying level of ignorance about basic scientific and medical facts as well as the priority given to people’s personal experience and anecdote over collective experience and data.<br /><br />If people really understood that the reason that they haven’t had typhoid, measles, diphtheria, polio, tetanus, whooping cough, mumps, rubella, etc., etc. is because they were vaccinated as children, then there would be no rationale for not having the Covid-19 jab or the yearly flu vaccination.<br /><br />The individualisation of experience means people can ignore the death toll, long Covid, and the number of people, including increasingly the young, still being admitted to hospital because “I don’t know anybody who has been ill” (to quote a recent TV news interviewee).<br /><br />Grahamnoreply@blogger.com