I think the point @stevextc was making (correct me if I’m wrong) is that if a person/persons are endangering you/someone else or being rude (ie attacking you, or parking on yellow lines, or jumping queues) then you can’t intervene because the law is on their side. But if we were the kind of society who would all intervene then the tide would change? So miscreants would fear messing with us rather than the other way around.

Mob justice is a big thing in Afghanistan.

It’s working out swimmingly for them.

I mean how **** stupid does the OP have to be to suggest “renormalizing” violence – oh yeah, street justice Duterte style! Awesome! That’s going to work out well in the long term isn’t it – and the vast majority of men are definitely not stupid enough for that renormalized violence to spill out into areas where violence isn’t appropriate.

Also, does anyone actually really think the police are stupid enough to charge you – if you get attacked after sticking up for a woman and you end up battering them? I know a few people who would have done some time if the police actually cared that much about known miscreants being on the receiving end of questionable “reasonable use of force”.

if you do have it taken off she’ll start to think that you’re trying to impress another woman!

Maybe she likes it if he does!

No idea if Fuji Kyowa Kirin are manufacturing C19 vaccines yet.

I’m mostly talking about the semi-nationalized outfits backed by government funding.

I conversely thought that authorization would be the easiest bit to speed up, it’s manufacturing that is always the total bitch that throws a spanner in the works. People, training, materials, facilities – it’s a huge task to scale up production like we’re trying to. What seems like a really small issue to an outsider can cause a batch to be delayed or binned.

Racists don’t always stay racist, you can change people’s opinions, usually by giving them hope.

We bombed Germany into the stone age.

You’d have thought that would have learned them, but they were still massive anti-semites for decades after. When push comes to shove people don’t change, only generations.

Yep, areas of inner cities are also desperately poor yet vote Labour. Funnily enough no one wants to point out that many of these Labour voting constituencies are above the national average for ethnic minority population %.

Yet take an equivalent constituency in economic terms but that is well below the average national % for ethnic minority population and UKIP/Tories do much better and these also tend to have the highest Leave % in the referendum result.

Yup.

Could it be that these ethnic minorities value education as a way to get out of their situation as opposed to blaming others for their situation and voting Tory? It’s almost as if it’s easier to be a racist than get an education isn’t it :D

We also started funding manufacturing sites to increase capacity before we even had a viable vaccine as the Vaccine taskforce recognised that production was going to be a major bottleneck….

Yes, but only one of those is close to being operational.

I imagine lots of countries in far worse position than us are thinking the same

As I’ve stated, the only reason why we are in a good position is because we were first off the bat to approve. If we hadn’t been, we’d be in the same position as the Europeans – if not worse.

Countries with younger populations, need not worry so much either.

Current progress means we are likely to be well ahead of the rest of the EU in vaccination, parts of the EU are going to struggle with low take up rates. I suspect the UK will be out early, Boris likes spending money so some stimulus already will happen

I wouldn’t count on this, I suspect vaccine nationalism is about to go hot and every man and his dog is going to be attempting to put export controls on product and materials.

UK has vaccine manufacturing capability, it’s making lots. Spreading the sources of supply spreads risk.

It’s not making enough. The UK government recognize this now, hence why they have gone on a large drive to build nationalized manufacturing capability.

So it seems that India is hanging on to four million of ‘our’ AZ doses to prioritise its own citizens. We should send a gunboat and sort them out, rule Britanniaaa and all that.

The perils of outsourcing to lower-paid economies, maybe…

This is hardly surprising considering this lefty forum seemed pretty against giving vaccines to the developing world at the expense of our own citizens. India is very nationalistic.

The Brits get what they deserve for deserve for generations of voting Tory and not taking any notice when shit like our plasma products supplier got sold off to China.

Oakley or those with a mask exemption but they can stand around outside tescos smoking tabs

I’m finding hard not to just be an outright abrasive **** these days. A friend of mine used to troll me a lot in the pub, in fact – I’m becoming distinctly aware that this friend has been a constant **** thorn in my side and I’ve mentioned her more than once on here – one time she decided to ask me loaded questions about MMR and Autism and I just responded gently at the time.

However, I’m apparently a judgmental prick who reminds her of Rick from Rick and Morty – because when she told me someone she knew nearly died from the Covid, I responded that at least she didn’t get autism.

Anyway, we aren’t talking now or something.

Also, I love it when anti-vaxxers talk to you whilst smoking.

It’s almost as if South Park is prophetic Kelvin. (See latest episode)

Hahahah searched for that publisher – what a **** whack job

https://mobile.twitter.com/paulaakpan/status/1371458159496282112

All this talk about vaccine certificates we should surely be more interested in actual antibodies and covid tests , having the had the vaccine doesn’t mean you necessarily have the antibodies and it also doesn’t stop you getting or spreading it either it just hopefully reduces your chances of ending up in hospital, surely an antibody certificate and a clear test would be much more useful

This is the sensible thing to do.

Therefore we won’t do it.

I expect bleeding out of your eyes and arse probably trumps instagram emojis.

There’s got to be a Tik Tok joke in here somewhere.

Something something I told you that we and Europe didn’t have enough manufacturing capacity to do this anywhere like as quickly as people hoped.

I suspect the British government and the MHRA knew this and that whoever was quickest to the mark would get a head start and avoid some of the supply constraints.

Another sunny upside to Brexit – we’re now a vaccine competitor to Europe as well. Prisoners dilemma at play.

Materials will be the next thing to be embargoed.

Seeing as no one else has mentioned this, I see that 8 Asian women have been gunned down by an Incel terrorist in the US.

Just wait till we get a proper nasty pandemic ebola type virus.

We can then have fun filling mass graves with anti-vaxxers – “Here lie 2000 idiots” etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/17/man-who-survived-ebola-five-years-ago-may-be-source-of-guinea-outbreak

Well I’m off to a buy a shotgun, 1000 rounds of buckshot and a house in the middle of nowhere.

Edit

Grew up around working class yet was quite affable around anyone I met regardless of their social standing (maybe I’m an ‘idiot class’)

This is how I feel. “Idiot Class” is how I’m going to self-identify now, cheers :)

I would be careful about the use of phrases such as “hard work” that suggest those who didn’t “escape” didn’t because they didn’t “work hard.” It falls into the same category of Boris Johnson getting over covid because of his “strength” and “courage” which also suggest if you don’t get over covid its because you are weak and lack courage. Which we all know is rubbish.

Yes.

In the case of the intelligent ones that don’t manage to get out, I think it’s more like some kind of working/under class Stockholm syndrome.

“All the people around me are abusive uneducated morons but I’ll stick with them because they’re “my people“.”

@oakkeymuppet that is such a strange and perhaps modern affectation, my gt grandparents met in an orphanage at the in the late 19th century but my grandad got a good education and did well for himself, never once referred to his poorer roots, perhaps for him it was an embarrassment rather than something to be proud of.

I think it’s a sign of the times and Trumpism, but it’s been bubbling away for a long time – in the country my wifes from people respect it if you get a good education and escape, in my hometown you become one of “them” liberal elites. It’s been like that there for decades.

It’s not “mindset” holding people back, it’s the hand of cards they are dealt when they are born.

There’s some “mindset” going on as well, I have a friend who speaks with a pretty posh accent, she’s highly intelligent – but she spent a couple of years sleeping on her grans couch when we were kids. To her, everyone who doesn’t live on a council estate is middle class, despite having a 2:1 degree in English and good A-levels – she gets visibly agitated around other educated/middle class people. Instead of using her degree for something sensible, she’s done lots of fairly dangerous working class jobs. She voted brexit because she thought it was in the interests of “her people”, ie northern and working class.

I was able to get out of my dysfunctional town, she did for a bit but relapsed back into a certain way of thinking.

If I’d been born to say, investors, or business people, I’d have been hearing about starting businesses and pursuing ideas, so I’d have had a completely different set of expectations about what the world held for me. We tend to identify with what we see around us, which is what leads to people saying things like ‘I can’t see myself doing that’ as a justification for not doing something. And it’s why role models and gender and race representation are so hugely important.

+1

This is why my wife has been such a good influence on me, she opened my eyes to a different way of viewing the world and opportunities.

There are controversialists like Jordan Peterson, who’s views are fairly abhorrent but doesn’t descend into abuse like that – and then there are people like Bill O’Reilly and Katie Hopkins. Burchill is one of the latter.

South Park Vaccine special is out! :) Its on Amazon

It is indeed Logic 1 Science 0. Logic (me) said you can’t pick up all side effects in a few months. Science (you lot) told me unequivocally and aggressively that you can.

It can.

For a properly manufactured batch.

That’s useful in a slowly escalating scenario, I wonder if we’ll see Japan get the bomb then? They’ve been moving to more of an offensive capability for a few years.

Not for a while, but this is a good read.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tragedy_of_Great_Power_Politics

Don’t rule it out, the post world war 2 peace could just be a blip in the ocean.

I don’t think it does yet either.

I do think it’s a start – but we need to start co-operating and reaching out to our friends in a much more productive manner than we have been. The UK has become a very inward looking country since Brexit, we have this ridiculous notion that because we’re an island we can afford to lose our friends, whether it’s from a right or left wing point of view, we’re doing too much gazing up our own arseholes as a country and we don’t understand the interconnectedness of the world and how important our allies are to us and our own wellbeing.

To anyone in South America or the Middle East those words would ring hollow, don’t you think?

And that means South East Asia and democratic Asia should acquiesce to more of it and we should abandon our regional allies? You’re arguing based on (as a leftist myself) lefty emotionalism as opposed to having any kind of coherent strategy as to how we go about reinforcing the rule of law in a world where Russia helped put Trump in charge.

We need more multilateralism and co-operation with countries that share more of our own values, not less of it.

and I don’t think you can really compare a few deep sea fishing boats (armed or otherwise) to the Royal Navy in your actual back yard, can you?

You can when they are used for armed shipping lane denial as they are in the South China Sea.

*by all means makes the Augustinian comparison of Ceaser “We’ve created a desert and called it peace” But arguably the Chinese have been hugely less aggressive in the last decades than we have. It’s high time we come to terms with that, and I don’t think sending a paltry wee carrier half way across the globe really does, do you?

The response it gets from the Chinese undermines your idea that it’s a paltry move. And at the end of the day, to rebalance the South China Sea and get the area operating under the rule of law everyone needs to chip in again. Flat tops are still a useful option to deny sea lane access if you really need or want to.

and it needed reminding that there were Superpowers that were angry and sent a flotilla to say, Panama? How’d that go down; d’you think?

China is already doing things like that – again a lot of these trawlers are armed.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/25/chinese-fishing-peru-us-beijing-row

And add her ex mate Toby Young as well as Parsons to the growing list.

The sad thing about Burchill is she had talent, a different take on things and was a rare working class voice in the media, when she started anyway, writing in the NME as folks have said and her column in the guardian could be great. And she could properly commit to an entertaining media feud (thinking with Suzanne Moore). Dunno if there’s a moral? Possibly that professional contrarians can become what they started out despising?

Everyone can claim they aren’t a racist until they interact with someone not from their cultural background, who has something to say about a historically white western topic. It doesn’t surprise me that she lost her shit at Ash Sakar as Burchill probably thinks she’s entitled to be the one directing and making opinion on her topics of interest, as she’s a white independent woman and all the other women in the world are clearly not as enlightened as her. She’s a trend setter, sticking it to the man, unlike these brown girls who are clearly still under the influence of the patriarchy and have no agency of their own.

The last significant excursion made by the PLA in any great numbers into foreign territory was 1979 into Vietnam, compare and contrast that to our record. The Chinese govt have long realised that money/trade was the real power, and they won that game a while back.

That’s not how wars are fought now.

They’re fought like the heat map above, using deniable assets. Everything is now war, the clearly defined boundaries between a state of war have now been eroded. As Rosa Brooks points out in her book “How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything” – it was two Chinese generals back in 1991 who recognized that and wrote a paper on how future postmodern conflict would play out.

And also by the US and by extension the UK…perhaps it’s high time we stopped creating bogeymen?

You can do this, whilst still sticking by your allies. That’s a very bien pensant lefty isolationist view.

This is a snapshot of foreign boats in Palawan waters

A huge amount of those are armed Chinese trawlers – essentially a militia at sea.

Has China started, looked it’s about to start, threatened with sanctions, tried to topple the govt of, started a proxy war with, started an actual war with, or otherwise imperiled it’s neighbours within a 4500 mile radius

Korea

India

Vietnam

Taiwan

Tibet

Burma

Sino-Soviet border conflict

So they most definitely have imperiled their neighbors, you really know your history don’t you?

And the shit about Hong Kong, that can’t be undone. But what matters now are that there are democracies around the world that are being undermined by both Russia and China, after Trump and Brexit now is not the time to retreat from those allies.

I’ll tell you what, have a look at the comparison between wars of aggression started by NATO countries, vs those started by Non NATO countries since 1945, and we can use that as a starting point for any need for South China Sea gun boat diplomacy

I agree with that sentiment.

But I disagree with the rest, mostly because lots of my friends through my wife are South East Asian so they understand just what’s at stake.

You either make a stand in the South China Sea or keep your mouth shut when the rules and human rights based order that the UN/the EU built post world war 2 comes crumbling down.

Democracies need to stick together.

I read this alot, and TBH (using Johnson’s own phrase) it doesn’t pass the piffle test. Do you honestly think that the US, or Chinese lack capacity or capability to overcome whatever special sauce we think we have. The idea of doing “more with less” in military terms at least is an absolute non starter.

If you have been keeping your finger on the pulse, lots of DoD analysts consider that in the long term the US cannot keep parity with China. Therefore it will need to rely on a strong network of allies such as the UK, India, Australia, Korea, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia to contain China. Increasingly other countries such as Thailand and the Philippines will play a greater part as their economies expand. The combined strength of these partners will be able to act as a military buffer in the region.

It’s NATO in the pacific.

Are you Schrodingers outrage? Simultaneously both outraged, but uncaring at the same time?

clearly not true

You like me, are a minority then.

But it is true.

Violence or the threat of violence or abuse of women is okay apparently, if the victimized woman is an ethnic minority and the woman doing the bullying is a white feminist.

Got to love people hey?