I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I've permanently damaged my eye sight.
I just rolled my eyes so hard I think I've permanently damaged my eye sight.
Did you find anything back there?
It's very busy out there, and nobody is quite six feet apart in these little street parties I've spied. Let's just BIG BANG everything back open on Sunday and have a punt.
This is all well and good, but it doesn't take into account how people will feel when this drags on longer than it needs to because of our government's incompetence and the impact that will have. There's only so much goodwill anyone gets.
It also completely ignores the things we've presided over that have been outright fuck ups, or are fuck ups waiting to happen, that have nothing to do with our society. Ordering dodgy tests I get, albeit I called the idea we'd be testing people for antibodies within days/weeks as bullshit, but how in the fuck do you order and pay for 400,000 gowns that don't work or appoint a head of contact tracing that was so bad as a director of a business its share price rose by 6% when she announced her departure.
It pains me to say it, as you're normally bang on with most things, but I think you're being blinded by your support of the Tories in normal times, which, like with people's hatred of them, shouldn't count for anything at the moment.
Had a kickabout with two mates just now. Fuck the NHS.
Had to go to B&Q today to address the shower leak problem. Massive queues at 8am. Was fairly quiet and organised indoors, which was inconvenient for me in the end as when I tried to retrieve the last pack of large tiles matching my batch number from under the shelves and the effort resulted in me releasing probably the largest fart ever recorded in a B&Q store.
I had never heard of this baroness woman until today, but she seems ideal with her varied (if not entirely amazing) private sector experience and NHS Improvement involvement. She Knows the Club, to coin a phrase.
The only thing I'm blinded by is possibly the fact that I haven't had a living grandparent for more than 20 years and so have long since forgotten what it's like to be attached to a vulnerable person. I couldn't give a stuff who is in government, and if we are surprised that public sector procurement is incompetent then we shouldn't be, it was ever thus. We have a particular political and social culture that is very much every man for himself, and that just doesn't respond well to a pandemic at all.
Hell, I think there's a very good case for suspending normal politics and having Labour and jock nats in the cabinet to get a broader spectrum of how to resolve this.
I also just went for my hour walk and everyone has given up, there are VE Day street parties everywhere and loads and loads of extended family home visits. In fact my next door neighbour's having one right now with three generations in the garden on top of each other.
People's refusal to follow rules pisses me off far more than pencil pushers in Whitehall being useless.
Yeah, I've just been for a stroll to the local shop, and there are multiple generations pitched up in a neighbours front garden.
The chav mountain bike groups are also getting back to the usual levels. Flaunting the fact that Spikey can't have them evicted for another couple of months, yet, I suppose.
Our roads were busier and it's generally looking like Joe Public has packed it in. This is one of those scenarios where you're only as good as your people.
If extending the lockdown is what's needed it needs Boris to get on the tv again and tell people what's what, then back it up with police intervention if necessary. Apparently as Jim said he can't be arsed to do that though.
We all saw how shit people were when they were left to their own devices when this kicked off, we've not heard anything of substance from the government for weeks now, so what did you expect to happen?
I can hear a party down the street singing Angels, so get the Royal Air Force in if necessary.
"And through it all,
she increases infection ..."
Almost back to normal.
The comms are absolutely terrible, probably because they're trying to run them like election comms i.e. avoid unnecessary mistakes and gaffes.
This needs something altogether different which is proactive and clear communication, even if what is said then needs to be updated or changed a week hence.
My mother seems to know what is going on and what has been expected of her, when she normally can't even watch a film without asking me demented questions, so I suspect the 'comms' have been fine for everyone not extremely online. It strikes me as another thing for media wankers to comfort zone in on due to them actually having some understanding of it.
Given the outdoor activity over the last week they clearly haven't been fine.
All the media in this country needs dismantled.
Yeah, because they can see the death numbers falling, they have their employers and the media wittering about us getting back to 'normal', and they're all fucking bored of it. Other than whatever that briefing the other day was about, the government has spent the past few weeks refusing to timetable anything, constantly saying that they need to be certain and all the rest of it, and the media has been moaning like fuck about it. What would you have been doing differently this week (and don't say you wouldn't have started from here)?
I suspect this sort of 'soft' breakdown of the rules isn't actually a bad thing if it blurs into a few relaxations over the coming week[s]. If everyone starts tentatively flouting restrictions now then there will be less incentive to suddenly start doing things when they are formally relaxed. I'll wait to see what the trusty behavioural scientists thought on that one.
If I thought it was still important to be locked down I'd have made that clear via direct addresses from Boris and increased police bothering. If it wasn't important to still be locked down, I'd have relaxed it. It really is that simple and I don't know why people are struggling so much with this. Instead they've done nothing of the sort, helping instead to create some of the media chaos by continually briefing them off the record.
Factoring a tolerance into the rules, treating this like underage drinking or speeding is fucking retarded. It's crossed my mind that that's what they're doing too, but it'll only once again punish those who are following the rules as laid out and create merry havoc when there's a wider realisation that's what's happening.
fuck sake
@Giggles will love that.
There have been government ministers on the telly every single day at five o'clock saying it's too early to talk about opening up, too early, too early... Your nan is still at risk. The PROTECT THE NHS adverts are still rolling round the clock. Anyone likely to continue adhering to the rules knows what they still are. People have just stopped caring, as was inevitable.
On the police bothering bit, there aren't enough of them these days to deal with most crime, never mind going around enforcing curfews like we're in east Berlin.
Theresa May can take the blame for that.
Of course it was inevitable, which is why what I said above needed to be done, should have been done if it's important we're all still locked down. People don't give a shit about deputy cunt appearing or an advert they've seen a million times. Get Boris back on and get the police to start publicly taking names again.
I don't know if you're being deliberately dense or your hard on for all things Tory has reached your brain, but this is such hard work.
Oh and DON'T brief the media that we're all going to be outside come Monday either.
They were doing fine at the start.
Reading your and Lewis' posts I wonder why anyone ever bothers doing anything.
Nazi's have a bigger army than us, have steamrolled Europe and communicate under an impenetrable code? It is what it is.
Phil Scolari shits it up at Chelsea? Leave him there, it is what it is.
Pandemic disrupting society more than anything has for 70 years? It is...
Some of the briefings might have been good old fashioned leaks. Editors have responsibilities as well.
It can't be inevitable that bored people would flout the rules and that this could also have been prevented by more Boris Johnson interventions. Do you think the fifteen people down the street drinking four feet away from each other are under the impression, having not seen a Prime Ministerial speech all week, that the guidance has changed? No. They just don't care anymore, and seeing as the distancing hasn't been dependent on active policing throughout (let's not forget how they did their best to lose any goodwill people might have felt early on) to have them suddenly start cranking it up would have required further official restrictions, which would risk tipping people into further non-compliance/would have been pointless.
Jersey have been doing antibody tests and seem to think the total number of cases they've had is about 10 times the ones they've reported (c.3,300 v c.300) which is quite interesting. If that's anywhere near right then the UK must be almost at 'herd immunity levels' by now.
And I don't even say these things as someone who definitely thinks the lockdown should continue, but the current state of inertia is neither helping the medical cause nor the economic one. So shit needs to be sorted out.
You are the only person who is approaching this as all or nothing.
I'd prefer to think half-arsed or not half-arsed, with no surprise that I think we're in the camp of the former.
If you want to change a culture, which effectively is what lockdown was seeking to achieve, albeit temporarily, you can't just do so by a standing order of Dominic Raab and Chris Whitty adverts. It needs constant reinforcement, from the top, with the approach changing to suit current circumstances. Ours hasn't, it's got stale, which is partly why people don't care anymore.
Anyone else seen the TikTok from NW Ambulance?
Michael Jackson is dead
It sounds there's a bad dose of the Flu going around in China.
Nothing will come of it.
Laws and not these piddly “advisories “. I’d love to see the cops here beating people back into their homes.
But Bowis loves fweedom
Basically if it spikes again, it was because we fucked about flouting the rules. If it doesn't, it was a masterstroke to relax the lock down.
I think we're pretty much at the end of social distancing in line with furlough ending. The old don't care, if we kill them then it's our fault but pensions will be saved.
There is a load of memes floating about of Twitter like the below:
And they are really fucking stupid. Yes lad, the economy is important. Stay Home, Protect our NHS is great, but 'stay home' is easily replaced by 'pay taxes'. A country with no cunt working for (potentially) years is not a country that can sustain a National Health Service. The economy struggling has a direct correlation with people dying and our economy hasn't been this bad since, I dunno, WW2?
The economy is a social construct we've created to make sense of the world.