RandoEFC

Won't happen unless there's one that resists the vaccine well enough to cause serious illness in a significant proportion of fully vaccinated people and the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence continues to show that the chances of this are remote.

Looks like I missed out on some fun here but props to @Stan and the staff for including the post that crossed the line in the bans and suspensions thread. A long overdue improvement to the forum.

Israel/Palestine is probably the biggest gap in my knowledge when it comes to major political conflicts in current/recent history. I do intend to read up on it. It doesn't help that all of the reporting in the West seems to be done entirely through the lens of Israel's relationship with the UK/US and this obsession with picking a side and it becoming a cynical proxy "you're racist, no you're racist" discourse between political factions in those countries. For now, all I can say is that it's terrible to see the casualties of so many innocents on both sides. People are talking about countries having a right to defend themselves, about laws, constitutions, etc. I'm sorry but if you're carrying out air strikes and killing children then neither of you are the good guys.

Because calling people cunts and using the emoji is always a sure sign that you're winning the argument. Is this going to be the first thread in forum history to win Thread of the Year two years in a row? That would be quite the achievement.

Because several people have spent multiple pages of this thread debunking and correcting things you've said that just flat out aren't true, or are based in either fallacy or on unrealistic expectation, and you don't even stop to hold your hands up on the bits that are demonstrably wrong before deflecting onto something else. After a while, there's no point in trying to "disprove" or "argue against" anything you say because there's absolutely zero prospect of a consensus that isn't based entirely on your predetermined opinion in your black and white world. As long as you pursue this style of debate, it's always going to end in people responding with sarcasm, insults, eye-rolling or people just ignoring you. Why should any of us bother drilling into the finer points of public transport policy at the start of the pandemic and the complex balances between logistics, risk and convenience that we all had to try and strike when you can't even climb down from your claim that everyone gets a post-mortem which has been proven comprehensively untrue? You can tell yourself that everyone else is being 'condescending' or that they're 'brainwashed' for continuing not to agree with you but if you refuse to acknowledge a grey area and refuse to acknowledge that there are parts of your argument that are flimsy or misinformed, then it's you who thinks your opinions are infallible and that you know better than everyone else, and it's you who's being close-minded, and effectively brain-washed by what you've already decided is true and false. I do have a genuine interest in why people end up believing the sorts of things you've posted in this thread, and why the distrust in 'official' sources of information runs so deep that you simply won't be budged from your chosen position by any mass of conflicting information, which is why I initially try to engage in good faith. I don't want it to become personal, so I'll try not to get too bogged down in the name calling and piss taking, but you'd do yourself a big favour if you just accepted it when someone points out to you that your source is dodgy or the claims made in it were disproved by fact checks (which happens to everyone) or you stopped to tell people you can see where they're coming from now and then and accepted at least a few elements of what they were saying.

Can't we just ignore this now? Several of us have engaged in this in good faith, eventually realised that there's no debating with someone who has adopted a certain position and won't be swayed from it by any evidence or counter-point no matter what, we've resorted to having a laugh about it, now let's all move on instead of perpetuating the misery, no?

This isnt 100% accurate. I have a theory that only 17 people live in India and that the majority of the country is actually inhabited by unicorns and minotaurs. I'm just as credible as any official source because you can't prove that they're 100% correct.

I think we've now firmly arrived in territory.

According to those numbers India's death to infection rate is about 1.09% and Pakistan about 2.21%. It's absolutely bemusing that you think this is evidence of some sort of cover up on either side. I don't know anything about why their death rates differ but perhaps Pakistan has a lower testing capacity so they have more unreported cases knocking about that makes it appear that their Covid-19 victims are dying at a higher rate.

So what better explanation is there for them to do it beside the fact that they need to do it for public health reasons? I'm a maths teacher, even statistics is not an exact science by any means, before you start playing with numbers to work out averages, correlations, trends, death rates, risk, etc, you have to make a huge number of decisions about how to track data, which data to record, which data not to record, how to record it, what to do with it, how to report it, where to draw certain lines. Then if you find a better way or recording and reporting data after trying it out for a while, you start doing that instead. It's no cause for suspicion that different countries are reporting different statistics in different ways, and it's certainly not surprising to see countries altering the way they track and report data when they make mistakes and stumble across better options in an unprecedented situation like a pandemic. Don't get me wrong, we should all think critically, and I'm not saying we should automatically believe everything we're told by governments and what you call the mainstream media. But if you're going to do that, you also have to take the same approach to things you see on social media or hear from your friends. And if the two end up getting pitted against each other, bear in mind that government departments and high profile media outlets have an awful lot more to lose than Dave down the pub or Auntie Doreen on Facebook if they get caught out peddling lies and spreading dangerous conspiracy, so it's not really very likely that it's the former sources that are doing it.

Errrrm...

What the government reports is the number of people who died within 28 days of a Covid death. This is a matter of objective fact and record. They do not report that Covid was necessarily the cause of death. Like I said, this was changed months and months ago for this very reason. It was a valid criticism back then but they responded by changing the wording of how they report the statistics. If people like you still want to bang on about the government reporting car crashes as death by Covid, then that's your choice at this point, not theirs. They're admitting by measuring it that way that Covid might not be the actual cause of death. You've also failed to answer either of my key points. Is your working theory that all of those waves of extra deaths were simply booms in car crashes that happened to occur when a lot of people had Covid? If not, then why does it matter if 5-6 people out of every 1000 Covid deaths actually died in car crashes or falling down the stairs? It doesn't significantly change the fact that the statistics they're using to track the virus are effective in identifying how many people have caught or died with the disease. And as for the motivation point - you say "this is what worries you" and then can't provide a credible reason why governments would inflict mass economic harm and unpopular restrictions upon peoples' lives for their own gain. You talk about the government looking bad - why would they game the numbers to make it look like more people are dying on their watch to make themselves look better? It's nonsensical, and any other theory you can think of is going to be completely made up and not supported by any actual evidence.

Again, the UK government held a press conference several weeks ago about the AstraZeneca blood clots. The scientists were completely transparent about the low risk that Covid-19 posed to younger people and admitted that, actually, although the vaccine still posed a lesser threat to under 30s than the virus itself, there wasn't that much in it, and as a result they recommended that under 30s (and more recently under 40s too) take one of the other vaccines instead. This was official government communication broadcast live at the time on BBC, Sky News and reported on later by literally every major news outlet in the country. If anything, some of the sensationalist headlines from the "mainstream media" over-played the danger of complications from the vaccine, rather than trying to "cover it up". If you place greater stock in your social media feeds and what your Auntie Bev heard from a friend of a friend of a friend, then that's up to you, but it's not going to wash with most other people.

I don't know about other countries but the UK reporting changed many months ago to "deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid 19 test". This isn't lying, it's just poor messaging from the government and the media failing to make it clear that the primary cause of death isn't guaranteed to be Covid 19. At the height of each serious wave of the virus, we can be sure that even though a few of those deaths might not have primarily been caused by Covid, the majority were. I have two questions for people who entertain conspiracy about Covid 19 being exaggerated: 1) If the spikes in deaths weren't almost entirely caused by Covid, then what series of events caused an unrelated spike in deaths in almost every country in the world at once during those times. 2) These governments and media sources that are lying about/exaggerating Covid - what is their motivation?

I only really clocked this when I was listening to a podcast the other day. I pay a lot more attention to these things than your average person and I hadn't read about or considered it, makes me think that the links with the SARS vaccines is somewhat under reported and we could do with highlighting that to people who are sceptical. I do understand the scepticism and nobody can guarantee that there isn't any risk, but nor can they when you jump on a plane or hit the brakes on your road car. I trust science though and that's the bottom line for me.

Labour won 30 seats out of 60 in Wales so we'll see how that works, I don't know . But the SNP basically can't achieve a majority because they didn't gain some of the key seats. Both Wales and Scotland have this weird list and constituency system though that basically makes it almost impossible to achieve an outright majority, so the fact that Welsh Labour and the SNP are anywhere near shows how much support they have. The significant thing for Welsh Labour is that they increased their majority in seats that went from Labour to Conservative in the Westminster general election in 2019, especially flying in the face of Conservative gains and Labour losses in the English councils. Scotland is interesting too because the Scottish Greens are pro-independence and have enough seats, along with the SNP to give a pro-independence majority in the Scottish parliament - although the vote share in Scotland overall favours the pro-union parties by a whisker!

I think he might be the man for the job. They need to win back a significant amount of the Northern vote without alienating the voters they're gaining down South (they just won the Cambridgeshire mayoralty off the Tories in the last hour or two which is a nice little gain but minor compared to the problems elsewhere). However he just said on camera today after his own crushing success that he'll fulfil a full term as mayor of Greater Manchester which takes him past the next general election. Left the door open for another run at the leadership down the line though. Welsh Labour did well, it must be said. Their success in Wales is actually even higher than the SNP success in Scotland.

This is surely not the answer. Growing increasingly convinced that Starmer won't be leading Labour into the 2024 general election.

Mad to see that not far north of the Tories demolishing Labour in the North East of England, Tories are tactically voting for Labour, and vice versa, to get unionists into seats in Scottish Parliament, while in Wales, Labour are actually having a really strong set of results. SNP have made some gains but not enough to sneak a majority. They can still form a pro-Independence majority with the Greens though. Salmond's party haven't polled well and appear to be basically irrelevant.

The postal votes will bail Khan out but even this is too close for comfort for Labour. Lack of turnout the problem here most likely.

Been impressed by Anas Sarwar too. Comes across as a sensible and genuine guy. Scottish politics is in deadlock because of independence though, I wonder whether a second independence referendum with pro-independence losing again would end the debate for the foreseeable future. Even if it did, it's hard to see either Labour or the Tories making much ground in Scotland. Another thing Labour need to do if they're going to get anywhere near government again.

All of this is true, indeed there was a stink when the selection process was basically rigged so that this guy was forced upon Hartlepool as their candidate after Starmer explicitly pledged to retain the open and democratic process where the membership would be heavily involved in the selection of candidates. The same thing happened when Labour's central management interfered with the selection of the Liverpool mayoral candidate after Joe Anderson was forced to step down. What's worse is that this doesn't even cover half of the reasons why they've lost and lost so heavily. There are massive issues at a micro-level specific to Hartlepool and the candidate in question, you can see from the results across the rest of the Tees Valley and North East that there are massive issues for Labour specific to that region, and the cherry on top is the massive issues that Labour have at a national level. The odds are so heavily stacked against them, much of it self-inflicted, whichever angle you look at it from. I don't even feel massive loyalty to the Labour Party. If anything, my idealistic vote would go to the Greens, but for anyone who wants to see a progressive government of any type any time soon, Labour's failure is becoming increasingly painful to watch. It's no wonder youth turnout is dipping again when all their best hope has to offer is depressing defeat again and again.

Fair, then perhaps things will be even worse but the 'liberalisation' of suburbs and young, predominantly Labour-voting couples families relocating to those sorts of areas stands. Local elections are complicated. I don't know much about Harlow but the demographics could be different there. From what I have read, the snippets of positivity for Labour are that Burnham is set to win by a landslide (he notably campaigned predominantly off his own brand and kept the Labour branding to a minimum), they're expected to win one of the regional mayoralties (West of England if I remember correctly) from the Tories and Shaun Bailey could end up with the lowest vote share for a Tory mayoral candidate in London yet. Although there were concerns from Khan's team yesterday about low turnout in London. I just hope Count Binface beats Laurence Fox to be honest. There's a lot of good analysis out there underneath the shouting, screaming and willy-waving of most of the media. The BBC always do some good stuff. Sebastian Payne and Jim Pickard of the Financial Times are always worth a follow on Twitter along with Alex Wickham of Politico and Sam Coates of Sky News. These guys are rarely wide of the mark. Owen Jones also did a really good 30 minute video on the Hartlepool by-election last week and even managed to keep his Corbyn/leftie-tinted specs off for most of it. It's more than just Starmer and Corbyn. Starmer could have performed well and still lost Hartlepool. If anything, it's sort of good for Labour to lose by so much because now it can't be put down to Brexit or the Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen or blamed on people still being upset about Corybn's influence on the party. This is full blown 'back to the drawing board' stuff, which is what Labour need at the moment.

It's not about the candidates though, Conservatives making huge gains across the North East councils too. A lot of people are talking about 'realignment' which is increasingly carrying weight. The Northern working class vote has swung heavily towards the Conservatives. The only results that have come out from the South East so far (Colchester) have actually been positive for Labour. If that's echoed across other parts of England outside of the 'Red Wall' then Labour will make up for some of those losses. There's no doubt that Labour will be unable to return to power without making significant gains again in Northern working class areas but their core support base now is increasingly the liberal, metropolitan areas and the suburbs that have traditionally been Conservative but are trending towards Labour. There might be some solace from the council results in areas like that. There's no getting away from the fact that it isn't enough to get anywhere near power but they can use wins and progress in those areas to build some momentum, a new narrative and a new coalition in the long run.

Disastrous council results in most of the North East so far too. And the Hartlepool vote was also 2:1 in favour of the Tories. Couldn't be worse for Labour.