Day of Chaos 2: a.Covid-19 thread.

[shaolin_monkey]

A message from Motley Crue's Tommy Lee:

It wasn't Tommy Lee who wrote that:

https://heavy.com/entertainment/2020/04/tommy-lee-trump-letter-twitter/


It was this dude on Twitter - @AJPennyFarthing

[Pete Wells]

My lil' girl has got us making hone made squishies tonight. I'm rather pleased with mine...

[von Boom]

A message from Motley Crue's Tommy Lee:

It wasn't Tommy Lee who wrote that:

https://heavy.com/entertainment/2020/04/tommy-lee-trump-letter-twitter/


It was this dude on Twitter - @AJPennyFarthing

That's a shame.

[Rately]

Clap for Boris? Christ. The right-wing media really are Gestapo-like.

The numbers being reported are horrendous, and we are being asked to clap and support a PM and his Government who failed us all, and continue to do so.

[IndigoPrime]

Funt Solo: thank you for your rebuttal earlier. Shark: consider this a warning. Earlier in this thread, it was clearly stated that misinformation on this topic will not be tolerated.

Tjm: "we're following the science"

Increasingly clear that line was double-edged (per perhaps, er, more edged). Sets up 'blame'. (We just did what the scientists told us.) But also aligns with ideology (by following/prioritising specific types of science, such as behavioural). Increasingly, it's obvious what should have been done: even if the nudge technique was used, it should have been started two weeks earlier, as a precautionary measure. Brexiters have been banging on about borders for four years, but didn't close ours when it actually mattered.

The US comes out of this even worse. You can only imagine how long this disease is going to rattle around for now.

[paddykafka]

Even the Cats are setting a good example.

https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10160377221751840&set=a.109041001839

[Tjm86]

Tjm: "we're following the science"

Increasingly clear that line was double-edged (per perhaps, er, more edged). Sets up 'blame'. (We just did what the scientists told us.) But also aligns with ideology (by following/prioritising specific types of science, such as behavioural).

Aye.  This is possibly the most terrifying aspect of all this.  It's almost like someone watched every bad Sci Fi catastrophe movie ever made and then decided to use the old "over-promoted half wit slaps down the outsider expert with the real solution" trope as their recruiting and crisis management strategy. 

If it wasn't for the fact that it was really happening and the death toll was so high I might be inclined to think that I'd turned to the latest hollywood brain-buster rather than the evening news.  It's like we're in the 2nd act where the muppets still run the show, the brainless leader has taken it in the chest but too many spineless lackeys are managing to keep his old plates spinning so the real 'experts' still can't get a look in.  Oh and by the way, the third act shocker is going to make the death toll by the end of the first act look tame.

I would like to stress that this is a fictional plot for a really dire "made for Channel 5 / direct to Amazon Prime" movie.  Any resemblance to actual events and / or people is just an absolutely horrifying coincidence.

[Jim_Campbell]

One of my (many) nagging fears for the medium-to-long term is that if we dodge the worst of the bullet in the UK and come out with only (!) 15-20,000 fatalities then we'll end up with another Y2K situation where people (including many who absolutely should know better) will claim the lack of a worst case scenario as proof of an over-reaction, rather than an effective reaction.

Which will only make it all the harder to coordinate an effective response in the general population when the next pandemic hits.

[IndigoPrime]

Thing is, short of a miracle, even our best-case scenario will put us as the worst case in Europe. (I suspect the USA will end up worse off per capita than we do.) The government will need to answer to that. Why did we do worse than Germany, France and even Spain, not least when we had massive advance warning? Blaming scientists won't be enough when there is video footage of Johnson acting like a fucking idiot and saying he was shaking hands with people, and that we didn't need to shut stuff down.

[Tjm86]

... we'll end up with another Y2K situation where people (including many who absolutely should know better) will claim the lack of a worst case scenario as proof of an over-reaction, rather than an effective reaction.

See this, to my mind, is where the mainstream media has been so utterly pathetic, to the point of criminality, in recent decades.  The focus on pushing a particular agenda, selling more papers / pulling more viewers regardless of what the content is like or catching the scalp of some major politician in the same vein as Woodward and Bernstein has led to a standard of 'journalism' amongst professionals that is execrable to say the least.  A prime example being our current, inestimable Prime Minister, who built his career on the sort of material that wasn't even fit for the worst type of tabloid.

Now you factor in social media and the tendency of lunatics the world over the share the latest tin-foil ravings of some Hollywood star / 'influencer' as if it were fact rather than the vapid crap that would get them kicked out of your local branch of Weatherspoon's and you can see where this is heading.  Or rather has led us.  Time and again I've leafed through some of the utopian dreams of commentators of the nineties on how the internet is going to free us all and lead us to Nirvana.  They didn't see the likes of Zuckerberg coming.

[Funt Solo]

...people (including many who absolutely should know better) will claim the lack of a worst case scenario as proof of an over-reaction, rather than an effective reaction.

This.

My extended family in the US have been creatively interpreting the "stay home" mandate from the state governor to encompass a variety of households (thus not actually following the advice) and I've been the one loudly smashing pots and pans together and shouting "Get off the beach! It's a tsunami!"

I expect as the curve gets duly flattened by the majority of people following the measures I'll get told "See: it wasn't all that bad - you were denting your pots and pans for nothing." Oh well. At least I'll be alive to feel the chagrin. [Knocks on wood.]

[The Legendary Shark]

Bank of England to directly finance UK government's extra spending.

Cautiously optimistic about this - at the very least it might get people (finally) talking about where money comes from, what it's for, and better ways to create it. On the other hand, I worry that the current [spoiler]CENSORED[/spoiler].

[Professor Bear]

Sharky, you are doing the government's work for them because you are splitting focus away from what they did wrong.  "China created Covid in a laboratory" (SPOILER: no they didn't) and "the public panic buying toilet roll proves that people are stupid and are the ones who are really at fault here" are much the same thing - a shell game to make you talk about anything other than the fact that the government tried to let hundreds of thousands of people die to protect the economy.  They want to fracture the narrative and get people following their own little strands rather than concentrating on the most important one.
And it's working.  I see people already not only talking about how the response was an over-reaction, but that even if it was true we should go back to business as usual anyway.

I don't think people are really grasping that we didn't save some lives because of our governments' actions, we saved lives despite our governments' actions.  The plan was to let us die, and if we weren't as interconnected and wired to each other via dumbass social media connections and got a head start on the lockdown ourselves because we saw that's what they were doing in Asia, we'd have fucking fallen for it and we'd be looking at a bodycount a magnitude higher.

[The Legendary Shark]

Just to be clear, the ending to my last post should be interpreted as [spoiler]TONGUE-IN-CHEEK SELF-CENSORED[/spoiler] and not [spoiler]REALLY CENSORED[/spoiler].

It's a kind of a joke, you see. I apologise for any confusion.

***

Prof, I'd love to respond but I'm walking on eggshells here. I'm even getting abusive PMs from one or two people who swear at me and then refuse to engage in further dialogue.

I have PMed an Admin and am awaiting guidance on what I can and can't say. (I have no problem with following the rules for public posts but I would like to know what the rules are so I can follow them.)

Everyone is more than welcome to PM me for a free and open discussion, if that idea floats your boat, but if anyone just wants a slanging match, I'm not interested.

[sheridan]

One of my (many) nagging fears for the medium-to-long term is that if we dodge the worst of the bullet in the UK and come out with only (!) 15-20,000 fatalities then we'll end up with another Y2K situation where people (including many who absolutely should know better) will claim the lack of a worst case scenario as proof of an over-reaction, rather than an effective reaction.

Which will only make it all the harder to coordinate an effective response in the general population when the next pandemic hits.

I'd chuck in people complaining that the campaign to have safe sex in the eighties to prevent AIDS was a waste of money as there wasn't a subsequent pandemic.  So I wouldn't hold out much hope that (if whatever the government eventually decides to do next works) they'll appreciate it could have been worse.