They're Racist and We Know It - A UK Politics Thread

[polishgenius]

I decided to dispense with the fancy punnery and get straight to the meat of the subject for this one. The Tories publicly fighting themselves because, essentially the England team did too well but then fell at the final hurdle in a way that the racists they'd been encouraging took as a signal to go full mask off is a sight to see. What's a little worrying is that they do appear to have lost at least this round of the culture war they started, the more shy, convincable opposition to the protests seeing such glaring examples of what the taking the knee was highlighting - but if things hadn't happened the way they did, would they have? And they're not gonna stop, they're just gonna look for other ways to come at it.

[The Anti-Targ]

48 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

I decided to dispense with the fancy punnery and get straight to the meat of the subject for this one. The Tories publicly fighting themselves because, essentially the England team did too well but then fell at the final hurdle in a way that the racists they'd been encouraging took as a signal to go full mask off is a sight to see. What's a little worrying is that they do appear to have lost at least this round of the culture war they started, the more shy, convincable opposition to the protests seeing such glaring examples of what the taking the knee was highlighting - but if things hadn't happened the way they did, would they have? And they're not gonna stop, they're just gonna look for other ways to come at it.

I see what you did there.

I think on the question of racism, almost no one is completely free of some taint of racism. So when someone says a thing is racist, and you recognise that thing is something you also think, but you see yourself as a model of virtue when it comes to matters of race, you will rail against that thing being labelled as racist, because that will mean you are racist. Very few people will be willing to introspect and examine their attitude and really change, when a much easier and self-assuring response is to simply deny that the thing is racist. Even actual racists will deny they are racist, because they will say that they are only the harbingers of hard truths that the libs won't admit are true, and truth can't be racist.

There aren't many reformed racists, but there are a few. This guy is probably worth having a listen to.

 

[BigFatCoward]

48,000 cases and 63 deaths and no mention of even tweaking the rules to be a teeny tiny bit more sensible. We are fucking fucked. 

[Raja]

10 hours ago, polishgenius said:

but if things hadn't happened the way they did, would they have?

Yeah, they probably wouldn't. I'm hoping this has at least shown what being a young black man in the UK is like, especially a successful one.

People, including in these threads, throw their toys out of the pram when they are called out as racist for saying racist things or exhibiting racist behavior - it's a form of gaslighting that is performed by people that are not allies of black and brown people.

[Heartofice]

39 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

48,000 cases and 63 deaths and no mention of even tweaking the rules to be a teeny tiny bit more sensible. We are fucking fucked. 

63 deaths is not high. Think back to the winter and how many we were talking about. The question is how much difference will the opening up have on the death and hospitalisation rate? 

Firstly, as has been most accepted, we pretty much have opened up already, which is why we are seeing so many cases. What difference will opening up more have on that? (especially given that masks will still be mandatory basically everywhere now). The answer is probably not very much.

Its also worth noting that while case numbers have been rising, that rise has been slowing very steadily and I’m going to assume will probably drop at some point. 

So what tweaking of the rules would you want to see? And what is the actual level of deaths and hospitalisations you would be more comfortable with ?

[Fragile Bird]

“63 deaths is not high”

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

5 hours ago, Heartofice said:

63 deaths is not high. Think back to the winter and how many we were talking about. The question is how much difference will the opening up have on the death and hospitalisation rate? 

Firstly, as has been most accepted, we pretty much have opened up already, which is why we are seeing so many cases. What difference will opening up more have on that? (especially given that masks will still be mandatory basically everywhere now). The answer is probably not very much.

Its also worth noting that while case numbers have been rising, that rise has been slowing very steadily and I’m going to assume will probably drop at some point. 

So what tweaking of the rules would you want to see? And what is the actual level of deaths and hospitalisations you would be more comfortable with ?

63 deaths per day is around 23,000 per year, roughly in line with a bad year for flu, and 15% higher than that very early estimate of the number of deaths we could consider to have been a job well done. Trouble is of course that it’s the middle of summer, and we can expect the death rate to increase significantly in the winter.

You’ve said multiple times that we need to learn to live COVID, like we live with flu, but in its current state COVID is significantly worse than flu and that’s with (very lax) social distancing, masks, working from home and no nightclubs.

I don’t know how much worse things will get after next week, but I expect it to be noticeable. I also don’t know what the answer to keep businesses running is. I do know however that “63 deaths is not high” is an unnecessarily callous thing to say. I’d be embarrassed to have written that.

[Werthead]

Based on Javid's statements, he seems to think that 100,000 new cases a day is acceptable(!). Assuming linear growth, which probably won't entirely track, that will be between 100 and 120 deaths per day, or more like 40,000 deaths per year. This is obviously preferable to the 1,200 deaths per day we saw at the peak, but it is also very much not preferable to, for example, 0 deaths per day from COVID, which we did fleetingly achieve a few weeks ago.

The logic is that between vaccinations and prior infections, we are not far from the herd immunity effect kicking in, that is cases suddenly dropping off because the virus has nowhere to go to infect people. The problem is that estimates on how close we are to that tipping point seem to be widely varying, from almost on top of it to still several million infections away. So the window on "how bad things can get" is still quite large. The potential issue of allowing the virus to continue to spread and mutate among the population, potentially creating a variant no longer impacted by the vaccinations and capable of spreading through the population again (effectively a different type of COVID altogether), and losing all the hard work that's been done so far, also remains.

[Heartofice]

Daily deaths from Covid in Jan was over a 1000. That is high. The ratio of deaths to cases now is completely different and we are living in a very different time to January. 
63 deaths a day is at a point where cases are incredibly high. There is little reason to believe it would continue like that all year. 

[Impmk2]

You're all forgetting that death rate is a lagging indicator, it takes a couple weeks for people to get sick enough to get to hospital. So the 50-60 deaths per day is more indicative of how things were 2-3 weeks ago.

 

ETA: So by my back of the envelope calculations that'd be 2-3x less cases. If it's still predicted to be 100k cases daily looking at 200+ deaths per day, and that's not taking into account excess deaths if the hospital system starts getting overwhelmed.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

32 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The potential issue of allowing the virus to continue to spread and mutate among the population, potentially creating a variant no longer impacted by the vaccinations and capable of spreading through the population again (effectively a different type of COVID altogether), and losing all the hard work that's been done so far, also remains.

This is what's key, aside from the death rates of course. Allowing the virus to rapidly spread because who cares, people aren't dying right now like they were before is courting disaster. 

[Spockydog]

Johnson and Patel must learn that others get burned when politicians play with fire
 

Quote

 

They did it so casually.

Johnson’s backing was communicated by a spokesman during the daily lobby briefing with politics reporters, saying the prime minister would not condemn those who booed and that he “fully respects” their right to do so. Patel delivered a patronising mini-rant to the national team’s footballers, dismissing their chosen form of protest as “gesture politics”, saying people had the right to boo.

Reports from journalists with solid sources in the Conservative party have explained that these comments were considered positions, taken in the “culture war” or “war on woke”, coordinated in particular by one of Johnson’s advisers, Dougie Smith, a long-term Tory fixer. The husband of Munira Mirza, Johnson’s policy director, Smith’s CV includes a period when he was involved in organising sex parties and orgies for wealthy people in Mayfair.

Tim Shipman reported in the Sunday Times that Smith is behind the strategy, which stirs divisions on racial and heritage issues, as a chosen route to allying the Conservatives with “working-class voters in the new swing seats in northern England”. Smith is said to be behind Oliver Dowden’s reinvention, from moderate remainer and somewhat ineffectual culture secretary, to culture war secretary. Dowden publicly rebuked the England and Wales Cricket Board when it responded firmly to the bowler Ollie Robinson’s historic racist tweets, a rebuke then supported publicly by Johnson.

But as Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Jadon Sancho experienced on Sunday, when politicians play with fire, other people get burned. Patel, who then condemned the racism, was directly called out for hypocrisy by Tyrone Mings, a leader among the England players, who told her she stoked the fire.

 

Great piece by David Conn in the Guardian. Highlights just how despicable Johnson's Tories have become. There does seem to be an acceptance amongst the higher ups that they've gone too far. Patel's people are doing the political equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears, ignoring all requests for comment, while Johnson is reverting to his age old strategy of blustering and bumbling his way through the storm, desperately hoping that nobody notices what an enormous, incompetent cunt he is.

Beth Rigby deserves enormous credit today for at least attempting to hold him to account for his blatant and deliberate racism.

 

 

[BigFatCoward]

I'm constantly amazed that more press don't call them out hard like this. I can think of nothing more fun than nailing the fuck out of a politician.

[mormont]

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

This is what's key, aside from the death rates of course. Allowing the virus to rapidly spread because who cares, people aren't dying right now like they were before is courting disaster. 

And not just for the UK, though of course Johnson's government notoriously don't appear to care about externalities.

[Raja]

As Lintern mentions in another tweet, that's operations cancelled in Manchester, London, Leeds, and Birmingham

[Stannis Eats No Peaches]

6 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm constantly amazed that more press don't call them out hard like this. I can think of nothing more fun than nailing the fuck out of a politician.

Agreed, and a straightforward response to Boris saying that racism has no place in this country would surely be to ask him where he’s planning on going.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

5 hours ago, mormont said:

And not just for the UK, though of course Johnson's government notoriously don't appear to care about externalities.

I keep going back to Africa, which I believe has a 2-3% vaccination rate. Logically speaking the virus is going to mutate a lot across the continent and it will become increasingly difficult to get ahead of the curve there so long as vaccines need to be stored in extreme conditions. 

But yes, Johnson, like most conservatives both in the U.K. and the U.S., seems to care more about the next quarterly earnings report than preventing this from being a serious long term problem.

[Liffguard]

6 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'm constantly amazed that more press don't call them out hard like this. I can think of nothing more fun than nailing the fuck out of a politician.

A combination of factors I think.

For the most part, they're friends. They went to the same schools and universities. They hang out in the same restaurants and bars. They're married to each other, their spouses are friends with each other. They inhabit the same world. It would be personally embarrassing for many of them to go too hard after a member of their own social set.

They also frequently rely on access to make their careers. Attacking powerful politicians too forcefully too often gets them cut out of the information loop. No more interviews, no more briefings, no more "leaks."

And, of course, anyone who would make it a point to hold the powerful to account is simply extremely unlikely to ever make it into a position within the billionaire-owned press to be able to do so, because they'd have found themselves filtered out at a much more junior position. As Chomsky said to Andrew Marr back in 1996, "I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. What I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

The whole interview is still worth watching IMO.

 

 

[Spockydog]

 

[argonak]

2 hours ago, Liffguard said:

A combination of factors I think.

For the most part, they're friends. They went to the same schools and universities. They hang out in the same restaurants and bars. They're married to each other, their spouses are friends with each other. They inhabit the same world. It would be personally embarrassing for many of them to go too hard after a member of their own social set.

They also frequently rely on access to make their careers. Attacking powerful politicians too forcefully too often gets them cut out of the information loop. No more interviews, no more briefings, no more "leaks."

And, of course, anyone who would make it a point to hold the powerful to account is simply extremely unlikely to ever make it into a position within the billionaire-owned press to be able to do so, because they'd have found themselves filtered out at a much more junior position. As Chomsky said to Andrew Marr back in 1996, "I'm not saying you're self-censoring, I'm sure you believe everything you're saying. What I'm saying is, if you believed something different, you wouldn't be sitting where you're sitting."

The whole interview is still worth watching IMO.

 

 

Yeah, this is right on.  Pretty much the same issue in America.