End the Lockdown
- Thread starter Walter
- Start date
Roughly half the Twitter accounts pushing to 'reopen America' are bots, researchers found.
Business insider
Putin scores again! Thanks Moscow Mitch & the Orange Balloon.
Business insider
Putin scores again! Thanks Moscow Mitch & the Orange Balloon.
In this video we look at a national education union boss advising 450,000 members on how to pressure and stop headteachers opening schools including shaming on social media. This is partisan use of our children's future. In my opinion, we need schools to open now or we are doing untold damage to our kids
The state lockdowns aren't working.
I wish I didn't have to keep repeating it.
And how long much further do you want the economy ruined, children's futures to be at risk and for people to to be barred from seeing loved ones?
This can't continue for much longer.
In this video we look at a national education union boss advising 450,000 members on how to pressure and stop headteachers opening schools including shaming on social media. This is partisan use of our children's future. In my opinion, we need schools to open now or we are doing untold damage to our kids
If your kids future is ****ed up, don't blame teachers.
Blame parents.
IMO this entire thing is showing just how valuable teachers are how stepped on and shat on they are by parents (used as 'glorified' babysitters') and should be the rally cry to push for more pay for teachers AND push for more money into education so when (not if) something like this happens again, there isn't this much of a panic from parents who can't handle their own effin' brats.
NB's 'lockdown' worked.
If your economy is 'ruined', don't blame the virus, blame how your economy is set up.
If your kids aren't educated, don't blame the virus, blame the government/parents who have a shytetastic education system for children.
I WILL give you credit on the seeing of loved ones... people who have loved ones dying of the virus in hospital and not being able to see them is devastating to the patient, to the families of and those attending them. Imagine how many more people will suffer like this because people are too selfish and want 'hair cuts' and 'nails done' thus passing Covid around without giving a second thought to it?
Early lockdown, contact tracing and testing means it won't have to go on for long; sad that no one in the governments seems to get that.
Well, I don't know about that. The lockdown in America hasn't worked.
Look at New York: 66% of coronavirus patients since the lockdown began are people who contracted it in lockdown.
I blame neither. I blame the lockdown and the people who called for it, like you.
Yeah. It is a shytetastic education system - there isn't one.
We don't go into lockdown because of the flu, and that kills 650,000 people a year.
END THE LOCKDOWN NOW.
No it's NOT what has everyone scared.
What has everyone scared is the prospect of them losing their jobs and the fact that if you lot keep tanking the economy we'll soon have no money to pay for education and health.
The way things are going, there soon won't be an NHS.
The economically illiterate Lockdowners don't realise this - they don't seem to realise that the economy pays for all that - and have to have it pointed out to them by people like me on a frequent basis.
Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown? Good
The hysteria over his trip to his parents' home is driven by nothing more than Remainer revenge.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
23rd May 2020
Spiked
Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown? Good. Welcome to the sensible minority, Dom. According to a survey published a week ago, 29 per cent of Brits have busted out of the lockdown straitjacket and done things they shouldn’t have done. I salute these people. Sensibly and carefully bending the rules to visit one’s parents, read a novel on a beach or, in Neil Ferguson’s case, to shag one’s polyamorous lover are wonderful buds of human rebellion in this dystopia we find ourselves in. It isn’t Cummings who should be ashamed – it’s the shutdown Stalinists who are calling for his head because he dared to visit his folks.
Yes, this is the story that Boris Johnson’s top adviser, the bête noire of the metropolitan middle classes, the alleged Svengali of everything that has gone wrong in this country over the past five years, drove from London to Durham with his wife when they were both ill with coronavirus. Listening to the Cummingsphobic Remoaners in the chattering classes, you could be forgiven for thinking they did this in order to cough their germs all over every motorway and lane in the land. But in reality they did it because they needed assistance with childcare, which Mr Cummings’ parents provided while Cummings and his wife stayed in a separate property close by and had shopping left on their doorstep by family members.
That’s it. That’s the scandal. They self-isolated while ill and made use of some grandparenting help. Did Cummings commit a crime? Nope. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said one of the ‘reasonable excuses’ for leaving your home in the pandemic is to ‘move house’, if that move is for ‘days, not hours’. That’s what Cummings and his family did.
Is Cummings a hypocrite? Well, possibly. There is unquestionably an issue here of rules applying to one section of society (us lot) but not to another (the political class). If Cummings has been in favour of punishing people who elect to self-isolate in a property that isn’t their normal home, then he is a hypocrite. But we don’t know if he has been in favour of that. His argument (via a Downing Street spokesman, which is probably him!) is that he did what you’re meant to do when you have the virus: self-isolate. This is different to when Neil Ferguson, despite being a vocal promoter of the necessity of lockdown, explicitly broke the lockdown rules by mixing with someone from another household.
But – and this is a huge but – even Ferguson should not have been punished for his lockdown breaking. Everyone needs to relax about this stuff. There is something really misanthropic and authoritarian in the urge to get the scalps of people who have only done very human things, and usually in a sensible, cautious way (Ferguson said he felt safe to see his lover because he had already had the virus). As spiked argued, Ferguson should really be criticised for his models, which look increasingly questionable, not for his morals.
I feel the same way about Cummings’ alleged crime as I did about Stephen Kinnock’s visit to his parents’ house (I said the police were ‘completely out of control’ when they reprimanded Kinnock), and about Ferguson’s sexual antics (I said I had ‘sympathy for Neil Ferguson’ because he only did what ‘people around the country have done: visit lovers and friends’). Using the stern, often ridiculous rules of the lockdown to bring down people you don’t like for political reasons is a very low form of behaviour.
And make no mistake: that is exactly what is happening in the Cummings story. Or non-story. This completely uneventful drive from London to Durham is being blown entirely out of proportion by furious Remoaners who loathe Cummings because they view him as the Svengali of Brexit, as the Leave mastermind, as the man who shattered their comfortable little political worlds by making the case for our exit from the EU. In their elitist and occasionally even conspiracist minds, they see Cummings as the puppetmaster of the little people’s brains who hoodwinked us into voting against our own best interests.
In that 2016 referendum, for the first time in ages, the metropolitan middle classes didn’t get their way, and they’ve been on the edge of madness ever since. Their visceral hatred for Cummings is really an unspeakable fury with democracy itself and with the temerity of the vulgar masses to vote for something that they disapprove of.
This is what this Cummings lockdown story is about. It is another act of Remoaner Revenge. It’s the embittered cultural elites seeking a Brexit scalp. It is a political vendetta disguised as concern about the pandemic. As if the lockdown wasn’t bad enough, now we have people politicising it to settle old scores. It’s this shameful, political authoritarianism, not Cummings’ careful trip to the north, that is the really shocking thing here.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/23/dominic-cummings-broke-the-lockdown-good/
The hysteria over his trip to his parents' home is driven by nothing more than Remainer revenge.
BRENDAN O'NEILL
EDITOR
23rd May 2020
Spiked
Dominic Cummings broke the lockdown? Good. Welcome to the sensible minority, Dom. According to a survey published a week ago, 29 per cent of Brits have busted out of the lockdown straitjacket and done things they shouldn’t have done. I salute these people. Sensibly and carefully bending the rules to visit one’s parents, read a novel on a beach or, in Neil Ferguson’s case, to shag one’s polyamorous lover are wonderful buds of human rebellion in this dystopia we find ourselves in. It isn’t Cummings who should be ashamed – it’s the shutdown Stalinists who are calling for his head because he dared to visit his folks.
Yes, this is the story that Boris Johnson’s top adviser, the bête noire of the metropolitan middle classes, the alleged Svengali of everything that has gone wrong in this country over the past five years, drove from London to Durham with his wife when they were both ill with coronavirus. Listening to the Cummingsphobic Remoaners in the chattering classes, you could be forgiven for thinking they did this in order to cough their germs all over every motorway and lane in the land. But in reality they did it because they needed assistance with childcare, which Mr Cummings’ parents provided while Cummings and his wife stayed in a separate property close by and had shopping left on their doorstep by family members.
That’s it. That’s the scandal. They self-isolated while ill and made use of some grandparenting help. Did Cummings commit a crime? Nope. The National Police Chiefs’ Council said one of the ‘reasonable excuses’ for leaving your home in the pandemic is to ‘move house’, if that move is for ‘days, not hours’. That’s what Cummings and his family did.
Is Cummings a hypocrite? Well, possibly. There is unquestionably an issue here of rules applying to one section of society (us lot) but not to another (the political class). If Cummings has been in favour of punishing people who elect to self-isolate in a property that isn’t their normal home, then he is a hypocrite. But we don’t know if he has been in favour of that. His argument (via a Downing Street spokesman, which is probably him!) is that he did what you’re meant to do when you have the virus: self-isolate. This is different to when Neil Ferguson, despite being a vocal promoter of the necessity of lockdown, explicitly broke the lockdown rules by mixing with someone from another household.
But – and this is a huge but – even Ferguson should not have been punished for his lockdown breaking. Everyone needs to relax about this stuff. There is something really misanthropic and authoritarian in the urge to get the scalps of people who have only done very human things, and usually in a sensible, cautious way (Ferguson said he felt safe to see his lover because he had already had the virus). As spiked argued, Ferguson should really be criticised for his models, which look increasingly questionable, not for his morals.
I feel the same way about Cummings’ alleged crime as I did about Stephen Kinnock’s visit to his parents’ house (I said the police were ‘completely out of control’ when they reprimanded Kinnock), and about Ferguson’s sexual antics (I said I had ‘sympathy for Neil Ferguson’ because he only did what ‘people around the country have done: visit lovers and friends’). Using the stern, often ridiculous rules of the lockdown to bring down people you don’t like for political reasons is a very low form of behaviour.
And make no mistake: that is exactly what is happening in the Cummings story. Or non-story. This completely uneventful drive from London to Durham is being blown entirely out of proportion by furious Remoaners who loathe Cummings because they view him as the Svengali of Brexit, as the Leave mastermind, as the man who shattered their comfortable little political worlds by making the case for our exit from the EU. In their elitist and occasionally even conspiracist minds, they see Cummings as the puppetmaster of the little people’s brains who hoodwinked us into voting against our own best interests.
In that 2016 referendum, for the first time in ages, the metropolitan middle classes didn’t get their way, and they’ve been on the edge of madness ever since. Their visceral hatred for Cummings is really an unspeakable fury with democracy itself and with the temerity of the vulgar masses to vote for something that they disapprove of.
This is what this Cummings lockdown story is about. It is another act of Remoaner Revenge. It’s the embittered cultural elites seeking a Brexit scalp. It is a political vendetta disguised as concern about the pandemic. As if the lockdown wasn’t bad enough, now we have people politicising it to settle old scores. It’s this shameful, political authoritarianism, not Cummings’ careful trip to the north, that is the really shocking thing here.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/23/dominic-cummings-broke-the-lockdown-good/
Here comes the blame game
The emerging clash between politicians and experts misses the most important point about the Covid crisis.
NORMAN LEWIS
22nd May 2020
Spiked
The Covid-19 crisis is going to give rise to a backlash against experts. One signal of this is the current public jockeying for positions in terms of who is to blame for the crisis. Scientists, health officials, other experts and politicians are gearing up for this blame game.
This week, Sir Adrian Smith, president-elect of the Royal Society, urged the government to ‘stop passing the buck’ by hiding behind scientists. He said the government’s Nuremberg defence – ‘we were only following orders’ – would not fool anyone.
He said the government should admit uncertainty and be more transparent about the advice it is receiving and how decisions are being made. In an editorial supporting Sir Adrian, The Times urged Boris Johnson to stop being so defensive, admit mistakes like the care-homes scandal, and acknowledge that there is much that, with hindsight, the government would have done differently.
There is indeed a critical need to hold government to account for its decisions during the Covid crisis. But demanding greater transparency is not the answer. The tendency for political leaders to hide behind scientists, and use their authority as a substitute for exercising political judgement, is the real political problem. Knowing the exact details of what advice was given in meetings, and how decisions were taken, would only distract from the broader debate we need about experts being used as a political shield in the absence of meaningful leadership and political judgement.
This crisis of political judgement, and the corresponding sacralisation of expertise, is a symptom of the culture of fear. This culture was dominant before anyone had even heard of Covid-19 and is underpinned by a broader corrosion of the importance and authority of knowledge. In place of knowledge and understanding, we increasingly have the institutionalisation of worst-case thinking. The fearful imagination has become society’s existential default position. This points to the great paradox underpinning the entire Covid-19 experience: people are demanding certainty at a time when society has abandoned the very tools – the pursuit of knowledge, the taking of intellectual risks – that can help us to navigate uncertainty.
Historically, of course, all technological advances and expansions of knowledge have been accompanied by unexpected outcomes. The inventors of fire never imagined that their discovery – which protected mankind from predators, gave light in the darkness and transformed man’s diet – would one day be used to burn people at the stake or in the ovens of Auschwitz. The unexpected outcomes of human knowledge are precisely what make it so open-ended, full of potential for both good and evil.
But while it’s true that knowledge can give rise to unexpected outcomes, to view knowledge as little more than a source of upheaval, of conflict and confusion, can only lead to the institutionalisation of the precautionary principle – of the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry, and therefore there are certain things we shouldn’t tamper with or explore in too much depth. This can be seen most clearly in the environmentalist movement, which essentially encourages humankind to cease intervening in nature and seeking out resources on the basis that the consequences will be dire.
The corrosion of the authority of knowledge has created an industry of worst-case thinking. We have witnessed the expansion of the empire of the unknown, of alleged threats, of claims about humanity’s problematic and uncertain future. Uncertainty has become a permanent state of existence. Everyday life has come to be dominated by doomsday Hollywood scriptwriters, pondering not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the next disaster is going to strike. This is why, long before Covid-19 emerged, there were numerous claims that we would one day face a plague or virus of Biblical proportions.
This is the core problem that Sir Adrian Smith is studiously avoiding. His demand for politicians to stop hiding behind experts is disingenuous because it fails to acknowledge that many experts have been as responsible as politicians for institutionalising worst-case thinking. Experts have become part of the problem. How else do we explain how rapidly Boris went from a mitigation strategy (the so-called ‘herd immunity’ approach) to a draconian suppressive one? A pre-existing culture of fear, in this case bolstered by the worst-case projections of the Imperial College simulation study by Professor Neil Ferguson, and further whipped up by a media clamouring for action, is the key force at play here.
Sir Adrian is also naive if he thinks experts can avoid the blame game. In response to his demand that governments stop hiding behind scientists, Thérèse Coffey, the secretary of state for work and pensions, played the ‘It’s the scientists wot made us do it’ card. She told Sky News that ‘if the science was wrong… I’m not surprised if people will then think we then made a wrong decision’.
Of course politicians should be held to account. And of course experts must not be above criticism. But Sir Adrian and his ilk should get their own house in order. Their task is not to tell politicians how to conduct themselves. That belongs to us, the electorate. It would be far better if Sir Adrian, as the next president of the Royal Society, launched a robust campaign challenging today’s risk-averse, precautionary culture that has contrived to undermine the authority of knowledge and led us to this precipice. Perhaps then we will build the antibodies that society needs to manage uncertainty in the future.
Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and managing director of Futures Diagnosis.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/22/here-comes-the-blame-game/
The emerging clash between politicians and experts misses the most important point about the Covid crisis.
NORMAN LEWIS
22nd May 2020
Spiked
The Covid-19 crisis is going to give rise to a backlash against experts. One signal of this is the current public jockeying for positions in terms of who is to blame for the crisis. Scientists, health officials, other experts and politicians are gearing up for this blame game.
This week, Sir Adrian Smith, president-elect of the Royal Society, urged the government to ‘stop passing the buck’ by hiding behind scientists. He said the government’s Nuremberg defence – ‘we were only following orders’ – would not fool anyone.
He said the government should admit uncertainty and be more transparent about the advice it is receiving and how decisions are being made. In an editorial supporting Sir Adrian, The Times urged Boris Johnson to stop being so defensive, admit mistakes like the care-homes scandal, and acknowledge that there is much that, with hindsight, the government would have done differently.
There is indeed a critical need to hold government to account for its decisions during the Covid crisis. But demanding greater transparency is not the answer. The tendency for political leaders to hide behind scientists, and use their authority as a substitute for exercising political judgement, is the real political problem. Knowing the exact details of what advice was given in meetings, and how decisions were taken, would only distract from the broader debate we need about experts being used as a political shield in the absence of meaningful leadership and political judgement.
This crisis of political judgement, and the corresponding sacralisation of expertise, is a symptom of the culture of fear. This culture was dominant before anyone had even heard of Covid-19 and is underpinned by a broader corrosion of the importance and authority of knowledge. In place of knowledge and understanding, we increasingly have the institutionalisation of worst-case thinking. The fearful imagination has become society’s existential default position. This points to the great paradox underpinning the entire Covid-19 experience: people are demanding certainty at a time when society has abandoned the very tools – the pursuit of knowledge, the taking of intellectual risks – that can help us to navigate uncertainty.
Historically, of course, all technological advances and expansions of knowledge have been accompanied by unexpected outcomes. The inventors of fire never imagined that their discovery – which protected mankind from predators, gave light in the darkness and transformed man’s diet – would one day be used to burn people at the stake or in the ovens of Auschwitz. The unexpected outcomes of human knowledge are precisely what make it so open-ended, full of potential for both good and evil.
But while it’s true that knowledge can give rise to unexpected outcomes, to view knowledge as little more than a source of upheaval, of conflict and confusion, can only lead to the institutionalisation of the precautionary principle – of the idea that it is better to be safe than sorry, and therefore there are certain things we shouldn’t tamper with or explore in too much depth. This can be seen most clearly in the environmentalist movement, which essentially encourages humankind to cease intervening in nature and seeking out resources on the basis that the consequences will be dire.
The corrosion of the authority of knowledge has created an industry of worst-case thinking. We have witnessed the expansion of the empire of the unknown, of alleged threats, of claims about humanity’s problematic and uncertain future. Uncertainty has become a permanent state of existence. Everyday life has come to be dominated by doomsday Hollywood scriptwriters, pondering not ‘if’ but ‘when’ the next disaster is going to strike. This is why, long before Covid-19 emerged, there were numerous claims that we would one day face a plague or virus of Biblical proportions.
This is the core problem that Sir Adrian Smith is studiously avoiding. His demand for politicians to stop hiding behind experts is disingenuous because it fails to acknowledge that many experts have been as responsible as politicians for institutionalising worst-case thinking. Experts have become part of the problem. How else do we explain how rapidly Boris went from a mitigation strategy (the so-called ‘herd immunity’ approach) to a draconian suppressive one? A pre-existing culture of fear, in this case bolstered by the worst-case projections of the Imperial College simulation study by Professor Neil Ferguson, and further whipped up by a media clamouring for action, is the key force at play here.
Sir Adrian is also naive if he thinks experts can avoid the blame game. In response to his demand that governments stop hiding behind scientists, Thérèse Coffey, the secretary of state for work and pensions, played the ‘It’s the scientists wot made us do it’ card. She told Sky News that ‘if the science was wrong… I’m not surprised if people will then think we then made a wrong decision’.
Of course politicians should be held to account. And of course experts must not be above criticism. But Sir Adrian and his ilk should get their own house in order. Their task is not to tell politicians how to conduct themselves. That belongs to us, the electorate. It would be far better if Sir Adrian, as the next president of the Royal Society, launched a robust campaign challenging today’s risk-averse, precautionary culture that has contrived to undermine the authority of knowledge and led us to this precipice. Perhaps then we will build the antibodies that society needs to manage uncertainty in the future.
Dr Norman Lewis is a writer and managing director of Futures Diagnosis.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/05/22/here-comes-the-blame-game/
Newly released police data shows that crime has plummeted by 25% during the UK lockdown. But one serious form of crime is on the up.
It’s a good job that there’s been a 36% reduction in burglaries, a 30% drop in serious assaults, that shoplifting is down by 53% and crime overall down by 25%, because it gives the police more time to deal with that most heinous of offences - CoronaCrime.
Especially those caught sneaking off for a clandestine overnight camping trip.
Yes that’s right, those guilty of the CoronaCrime of sleeping within a tent.
"Loitering Within Tent"
Last edited:
LMAO! Wow... that's possibly one of the best, most ignorant statements from you yet. And proof you don't have a brain to reason with.
I didn't call for a lockdown.
I'll abide by it because it's to keep people safer and to keep from overwhelming the healthcare system. Here, it's done that.
Exactly, wasn't really one before it started and that was proven after things started. Again, Teachers were not teaching, they're glorified babysitters and now parents are seeing just how hard teaching kids is. Hopefully it leads to changes.
A year.
A YEAR.
Meanwhile, Covid has killed 343,800 already. HALF the number of the flu, in a handful of months. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/?utm_campaign=homeAdvegas1?" \l"countries
So had there been no restrictions, it would have been more, so much more. And it's STILL too many.
That's your ignorance. You can't compare it to the flu for various reasons, yet you continue to do so because you're, well, an idiot.
"Die, Mothafukas, Die!" Start saying that, it's what you really mean, right?
