Coronavirus

[Pureblood]

1 minute ago, Colonel Bumcunt said:

Get it done you blubbering fanny.

Why, because you said so? Fuck off. 

[Bobby Hundreds]

You can die driving a car would you never set foot in one again knowing you're not invincible. It seems to be a very acceptable risk like any other of the thousands we take just by being alive and mortal.

[Captain Howdy]

3 hours ago, TK421 said:

Absolutely.  I'm in it for the long haul, I don't think it's going away.

 

You won't find me in a pub or restaurant.

TK circa 2030

 

 

[Bruce Spanner]

4 minutes ago, Champ said:

Just listen to this blithering stuttering idiot

 

Looks like he had a small one, a little one, for Dutch courage about a week ago and just thought 'fuck it' and powered through.

 

Disgrace.

[TheHowieLama]

3 hours ago, TK421 said:

That doesn't seem to be helping with transmission though, does it?  We were told that the vaccines would reduce transmission, yet here we are with a new variant growing exponentially.

Whomever said vaccines reduce transmission was incorrect. They do what vaccines do.

 

3 hours ago, TK421 said:

Absolutely.  I'm in it for the long haul, I don't think it's going away.

 

You won't find me in a pub or restaurant.

 

3 hours ago, TK421 said:

 

5.  I'm not comfortable with the concept of vaccine passports and compulsory vaccinations for certain jobs etc.  I'd rather not live in a world where these things become commonplace, so if the virus kills me as an unvaccinated person then so be it.

 

It's not going away yet you will not be doing the one thing proven to enable just that?

 

Seems they will become commonplace unless - well...

 

 

I think the divisions that are emerging between vaccinated/unvaccinated people are disturbing.

 

They seem to be very similar - and in the vast majority of instances based on the same mindset (and folks) as pro/anti mask was.

 

 

[s(k)aturation]

 

I'm definitely going to a pub or restaurant in England.  Now.

[Pureblood]

1 minute ago, Captain Howdy said:

TK circa 2030

 

 

 

More than happy to socialise outdoors (per official advice). Wanna walk in the park with TK? Anytime (turnaround, turnaround).

 

A few hours inside the pub chatting away maskless at high volume and multiple visits to the Covid nest toilets? No ta. 

[Barrington Womble]

1 minute ago, TK421 said:

Okay, permit me to rephrase it: I vehemently disagree with vaccine passports and mandatory vaccination.

Which is fair enough. It's a bit mental for a) to say you'd sooner die and b) for it to have any impact on your fears of getting a vaccine, they're not linked. While I don't agree with your reasons of being fearful of the vaccine, I don't see fear as an unreasonable position, especially given the newness of the vaccines (and I assume you are young and feel not at risk). But passports shouldn't hold any relation to that fear. We'll either have them or we won't. 

 

Personally I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to implement (once everyone has been offered a vaccine), as people with vaccines have done everything possible to reduce their likelihood of carrying the virus and infecting others. I would prefer to be in environment where those running the pub/stadium/plane ensures an environment that is as covid safe as possible, which includes keeping anti-vaxers out. 

[sir roger]

6 minutes ago, Champ said:

Just listen to this blithering stuttering idiot

Of all the things I have read about Johnson the fact that he was the president of the Oxford Debating Society surprises me the most , he cannot string two words together.

[Captain Howdy]

In fairness I don’t think there’s anything wrong with somebody refusing the jab. It’s a personal decision and you shouldn’t have to justify yourself.

[Bruce Spanner]

1 minute ago, sir roger said:

Of all the things I have read about Johnson the fact that he was the president of the Oxford Debating Society surprises me the most , he cannot string two words together.

 

President of the OU is a popularity contest and not an indicator of oratory skills...

[Pureblood]

3 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

Whomever said vaccines reduce transmission was incorrect. They do what vaccines do.

 

They seem to be very similar - and in the vast majority of instances based on the same mindset (and folks) as pro/anti mask was.

 

 

Other vaccines do prevent infections and infections progressing to even mild symptoms.  I got the BCG jab, I can be virtually certain I will never get tuberculosis.  Whereas the Covid vaccines have nowhere near that level of protection when up against a continuously mutating virus. 

 

The face mask mindset is similar I agree, the only thing I would say is that nobody gets blood clots or myocarditis from wearing a mask as far as I'm aware.

[s(k)aturation]

2 minutes ago, sir roger said:

Of all the things I have read about Johnson the fact that he was the president of the Oxford Debating Society surprises me the most , he cannot string two words together.

 

I've actually always thought he was a pretty good writer/journo, his features, articles etc... I was given a book he wrote about Churchill, which, Johnson's opinions aside - his opinions are a very different matter - is quite well written I think.

[Bruce Spanner]

4 minutes ago, skaro said:

 

I've actually always thought he was a pretty good writer/journo, his features, articles etc... I was given a book he wrote about Churchill, which, Johnson's opinions aside - his opinions are a very different matter - is quite well written I think.

 

And factually incorrect in numerous places, sometimes hilariously so...

 

https://www.newstatesman.com/books/2014/11/one-man-who-made-history-another-who-seems-just-make-it-boris-churchill.

 

'Boris Johnson, as the subtitle of this book proclaims, is a firm believer in the “great man” theory of history. Not for him the subtleties of the complex interplay of historical forces and individual personalities. Subtlety is not Boris’s strong point. Winston Churchill alone, he writes, “saved our civilisation”. He “invented the RAF and the tank”. He founded the welfare state (although Boris gives David Lloyd George a bit of credit for this, as well). All of this, he argues, confounds what he sees as the fashion of the past few decades to write off “so-called great men and women” as “meretricious bubbles on the vast tides of social history”. The story of Winston Churchill “is a pretty withering retort to all that malarkey. He, and he alone, made the difference.”

 

Marxists, he writes, go eat your words. Except that it’s not just Marxists who have argued for the impact of wider economic, social, cultural and even ideological forces on history. Anyone who has the time or energy to press a couple of keys on a computer to look up “tank”, “RAF”, “welfare state” or even “the Second World War” on Wikipedia will see Boris’s sweeping claims vanish in a cloud of inconvenient facts. Churchill did not, as Boris claims, invent the term “Iron Curtain” to describe the barrier between Soviet-dominated Europe and western Europe. It was first used by the Nazis – above all, by their propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Nor did he invent the term “Middle East”: it was coined by the American naval thinker Alfred T Mahan in 1902.

 

At many junctures in the book, the ability to think historically deserts its author. He describes men such as Hitler as “short” when their height (5ft 8in in his case) exactly matched the average height of European men at the time; and he describes Churchill as a “Victorian Whig”, though the Whigs’ attitude to the state in legislation such as the 1834 Poor Law was entirely different to Churchill’s. The contemporary references to television shows such as Downton Abbey are among the many factors that will ensure this book has a very brief shelf life. Boris writes disapprovingly of the extramarital affairs of Edith Aylesford, a society lady of the late-Victorian era. “That was how they carried on in those days, you see,” he comments. Not just in those days, Boris.

 

Johnson doesn’t weigh up policies and ideas with any care or penetration. If he doesn’t like them, he dismisses them as “rot”, “tripe”, “loopy”, “bonkers”, “barmy” or “nuts”; their advocates and practitioners as “loonies”, “plodders”, “Stilton-eating surrender monkeys”, and so on.

 

There are some truly cringe-making metaphors and wordplay in the book. Churchill, we learn, was “mustard keen on gas” as a weapon in the First World War. He was “the large protruding nail on which destiny snagged her coat”. Young Tories “think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio Parmigiano. He is their biggest cheese.” And Chamberlain’s “refusal to stand up to Hitler” was “spaghetti-like” (clearly Boris is rather fond of Italian food).

 

The book reads as if it was dictated, not written. All the way through we hear Boris’s voice; it’s like being cornered in the Drones Club and harangued for hours by Bertie Wooster. The gung-ho style inhibits thought instead of stimulating it. There’s huge condescension here. The Churchill Factor advertises itself as an attempt to educate “young people” who think that Churchill is a bulldog in a television advertisement rather than Britain’s greatest statesman but talking down to them is no way to achieve this aim.

 

In a book that involves a good deal of modern European history, Boris the Eurosceptic clearly doesn’t find it necessary to master the details. Croatia, he tells us casually, was ruled by “some Ustasha creep or other” in the interwar years (it was not), while in the same period there was a plague of “communist uprisings in eastern Europe” (there was not). The Cecilienhof Palace in Potsdam, he writes in his offhand way, was “originally intended for some minor offshoot of the Hohenzollern dynasty” (it was not – it was built for the crown prince, heir to the German throne). He thinks that German industrial relations before 1914 were characterised by “co-operation between bosses and workers” (they were not). Hitler did not plan to kill the disabled, as he claims: most of the disabled in Germany in the 1930s were war veterans. The Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did.

 

Boris ties himself up in knots trying to distance Churchill from the idea of European unity, salvaging a mildly sceptical quote from the apogee of his imperialist enthusiasm in the 1930s to undermine his hero’s advocacy of European unity in the 1950s.

 

Present-day politics obtrude in other ways, too. Anyone who wonders why Boris has written this book need look no further than the general election that is due in a few months’ time. If the Conservatives lose, the leadership of the party will be up for grabs and Boris will be a candidate. Writing a book about Churchill might help people take him seriously. After all, Churchill, he writes, “spoke in short Anglo-Saxon zingers”. He was a “rogue elephant” in the Tory party. He made a career as a highly paid journalist. He was definitely not a “lefty-liberal Milquetoast”. “He was no party-pooper.” He was “incorrigibly cheerful” and his verbal style was both “demotic and verbally inventive”. He “incarnated something essential about the British character – and that was his continual and unselfconscious eccentricity”. Now, who is this meant to remind you of?'

[s(k)aturation]

2 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Other vaccines do prevent infections and infections progressing to even mild symptoms.  I got the BCG jab, I can be virtually certain I will never get tuberculosis.  Whereas the Covid vaccines have nowhere near that level of protection when up against a continuously mutating virus. 

 

The face mask mindset is similar I agree, the only thing I would say is that nobody gets blood clots or myocarditis from wearing a mask as far as I'm aware.

 

I get very hot.

 

[Pureblood]

4 minutes ago, Captain Howdy said:

In fairness I don’t think there’s anything wrong with somebody refusing the jab. It’s a personal decision and you shouldn’t have to justify yourself.

You do have to justify yourself, in my experience.  The peer pressure is considerable.  When I tell people (because they do ask) they're always shocked and ask for reasons. The vaccine has been built up by the media to have a god-like indefatigable status, and people want to know why you haven't had one. Particularly if you want to become intimate with them (that's not me chatting you up). 

[s(k)aturation]

9 minutes ago, Bruce Spanner said:

 

And factually incorrect in numerous places, sometimes hilariously so...

 

Again, I was commenting about the writing itself.  The facts are all over the shop.

 

Indeed, I didn't say it wasn't a work of fiction... mind you, more tales than not of Churchill's "greatness" are about as factual as Hansel and Gretel, and plenty of them are quite (vain)gloriously espoused.

 

For instance, I think Johnson refers to Churchill, in places, as a socialist.

 

Ha ha.

 

Just as I refer, of course, to my auntie with whiskers as my uncle.

 

 

[Captain Howdy]

1 minute ago, TK421 said:

You do have to justify yourself, in my experience.  The peer pressure is considerable.  When I tell people (because they do ask) they're always shocked and ask for reasons. The vaccine has been built up by the media to have a god-like indefatigable status, and people want to know why you haven't had one. Particularly if you want to become intimate with them (that's not me chatting you up). 

Damn, you were getting my hopes up then

[TheHowieLama]

10 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Other vaccines do prevent infections and infections progressing to even mild symptoms.  I got the BCG jab, I can be virtually certain I will never get tuberculosis.  Whereas the Covid vaccines have nowhere near that level of protection when up against a continuously mutating virus. 

 

We both know Covid is like the flu.

And flu vaccines do not "prevent" infection. There have been adverse reactions to any and every kind of vaccine.

4 minutes ago, TK421 said:

Particularly if you want to become intimate with them 

Where are you putting the masks at this juncture?

[Pureblood]

12 minutes ago, Barrington Womble said:

Personally I think it's a perfectly reasonable thing to implement (once everyone has been offered a vaccine), as people with vaccines have done everything possible to reduce their likelihood of carrying the virus and infecting others. 

That's a very broad generalisation to make and one I disagree with. I mean, unless you know each of these vaccinated people personally how do you know they've done "everything possible to reduce their likelihood of carrying the virus"? For all you know, they could have been having daily orgies.

 

In fact, paradoxically, I'd say that vaccinated people could be MORE likely to be infectious because mentally they are more likely to have relaxed their guard, socialised and mixed more and so on. 

 

For those of you who have been vaccinated, have you found yourself mixing more since you had the injection?

[Pureblood]

4 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

There have been adverse reactions to any and every kind of vaccine.

 

True, but there have been more for the Covid vaccines. I believe they are officially the most dangerous vaccines ever produced based on your country's VAERS reporting system, by some margin.  Which is fine, I don't mind if there are side effects, I just want to know fully what they are before I'm vaccinated.  It's about informed consent. 

[TheHowieLama]

Just now, TK421 said:

True, but there have been more for the Covid vaccines. I believe they are officially the most dangerous vaccines ever produced based on your country's VAERS reporting system, by some margin.  Which is fine, I don't mind if there are side effects, I just want to know fully what they are before I'm vaccinated.  It's about informed consent. 

I would imagine this is by many multiples the largest and quickest mass vaccination ever. So per million doses?

[3 Stacks]

21 minutes ago, Captain Howdy said:

In fairness I don’t think there’s anything wrong with somebody refusing the jab. It’s a personal decision and you shouldn’t have to justify yourself.

It's complicated. Everyone should be getting it and it's selfish to not get it as the ones that do get it are contributing towards the end of the pandemic. But at the same time, we are kind of flying blind here in a way in terms of safety. 

[Anubis]

35 minutes ago, Stouffer said:

Even that wouldn't help, I'm that much of a shithouse. I'd honestly rather have it delivered via a suppository. 

Purple Aki says he’s up for it if you are.

[TheHowieLama]

6 minutes ago, TK421 said:

That's a very broad generalisation to make and one I disagree with.

Come on man.,

Even you know that is ridiculous. By far the biggest scruffs of the whole ordeal have been both anti-mask, anti-vaxx. Many vehemently.

You know that 100% of those folks have been the most prolific spreaders throughout.