Governments anxious to be seen to “do something” (the curse of democratic politicians everywhere) made grand dramatic gestures – building hospitals in days that would normally have taken years. To hell with whether they were needed or not (the much bruited London Nightingale reportedly has just 19 patients) Look! We are doing stuff. Stuff you could never do yourselves!! The State and its hordes are heroes.
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Samizdata quote of the dayApril 16th, 2020 |
 17 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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Doctors and Nurses are heroes. They are the Lions led by the Donkeys who inhabit Whitehall and Westminster.
UK Politicians giving themselves £10,000 of taxpayer to stay at home, while failing to give nurses anything.
We are led by a fat, indolent, lazy donkey of a PM who is so decadent and entitled, that he said he can’t live on less than a £150,000 salary (£150,000 of YOUR MONEY) showing that he is a parasitic sponger par excellence. Greed is his motive. Fame is the spur for the fat twit. Spaffer “Garden Bridge” Boris sure loves stealing money from the taxpayer, as do the “behavourial scientists” who are not scientists at all, but yet another group of think tank scumbags who offer nothing of value while fleecing off the taxpayer.
Whitehall crippling regional government and centering more power for itself, and then proving that they utterly ignorant of anywhere outside London, is one of the biggest reasons for the UK’s inept response. Many of the deaths in the Midlands can be rightfully blamed on Whitehall’s metropolitan arrogance.
South Korea, Taiwan, Finland, New Zealand, Germany, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Denmark.
All have vastly lower death tolls than the UK. The numbers make it very clear which countries are handling this right. Even third world countries are outperforming the UK. Let that sink in.
Patrick Vallance thinks “20,000” deaths is a “good result”. Orwellian indeed. Defeat is apparently victory, according to Vallance.
That’s like a grand prix driver finishing last, an hour after the other drivers, patting himself on the back and saying “I did well!”
And Britain will indeed be last. For as Iceland, Finland, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Greece, and many other nations with actually competent leaders head out of lockdown, the UK, with no mass testing (despite being offered 1 million testing kits which it has oddly refused), will become a global joke, trapped in lockdown as it’s overpaid, overweight leader, the consumate charlatan and narcissist, discovers that his quest for power and self-aggrandizement has left him with a stinking, rotting monkey’s paw.
I just at this point recognized it as a satire. 😆
No, it was satire from: Doctors and Nurses are heroes.
Doctors and nurses literally sign up to look after sick people. That is the reason for their existence.
To clap them as heroes for doing what is literally their job takes a special sort of idiot.
Yes, some of them are working long hours. Some of them are quite stressed. But I’m working quite hard and I’m quite stressed, and I do not consider myself remotely heroic.
Do you really think that a third world inability to count is the proof of high performance?
Or that that because a country doesn’t have a lot of old and infirm for CV19 to knock off that its health performance is good?
Gaza–You are an embarrassment to anyone who has ANY capacity for rational thought.
Listing several countries with tiny populations and saying fewer people have died there is a new low even for you.
The good thing is that you demonstrate that the even more stupid left–in wanting even more stupid state capers –has no idea.
Had your gang of clowns stuck to their orig line that CCPvirus is no big deal they would now have a powerful and ever-more -dangerous weapon to hand.
As it is–by working their eternal angle of being holier-than-thou the left have blown both their own feet off.
Blojo will soon be in big trouble for having wrecked the economy via hysterical over-reaction. You leftist goons won’t be able to cash in on that as you not only agreed with him but have spent a month claiming that he wasn’t over-reacting hysterically enough.
Good luck with that “narrative” numpties.
I cant decide if the “Gary” bot is performance art, provoking and deliberately subverting the purpose of the forum, or is he a clever way of encouraging discussion or if he really has passed the reverse Turing test and is an NPC live and wild?
Sad. Either way TLDR.
The problem remains with this pandemic the newspapers repeat the politicians’ verbal diarrhoea. Politicos think everyone agrees. Twitter does the same. No negative message gets to the top in strong form to influence policy….
Can you explain why the government is covering up the care home deaths, then? Erasing the elderly from history even as they die as the government is doing seems a bit scummy. Some might even say, it’s the kind of criminal behaviour you would see from, say, China?
It’s almost like they want lots of the elderly to die, which would of course be a huge financial boon to any government, a fact even cheerfully stated by Boris ally Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph.
Why, despite an absolutely enormous amount of time to prepare, the British government didn’t make any preparations at all and didn’t do the smart, sensible thing and follow South Korea and Taiwan’s lead?
Perhaps our arrogant politicians and scientists thought themselves cleverer than the South Koreans and Taiwanese, purely on the basis that being British somehow imbued them with a special magical insight that those silly Asians lacked?
Ah yes, Mr. Halpern claimed we are “different”, a classic euphemism for “superior”.
Should we not have employed actual proper scientists who use actual evidence instead of pseudo intellectual claptrap spouting “behavioural scientists”, whose work the government, so besotted with their amazing theories, refuses to release to the public?
Maybe they fear the documents will amaze us with their truly dazzling insight? It surely can’t be because they would be ridiculed and scorned by the public and scientific community?
Maybe letting people fly into Heathrow from hotspots like China, Italy, Spain, and America with no checks was more than a bit stupid? Maybe even criminal negligence?
Was having checks at airports really beyond the imagination of the government?
The virus was given far more freedom than UK citizens have ever had; allowed free passage through airports, and even given a free ticket to the Cheltenham Festival and Liverpool Athletico Madrid football match.
Talk about rolling out the red carpet! Bojo’s government welcomed the virus with open arms.
Apparently, this phase, where the virus got to have a whale of a time at footie matches and Cheltenham, and everywhere else, and doing as it damn well pleased, was called the “containment phase”.
Why also has the government, whose testing has been a total fiasco of incompetence (Come to Chessington World of Adventures and…nothing!) rejected an offer for the desperately needed tests? Tests which are pretty much the only way out of lockdown. Which South Korea and Taiwan have proven beyond all doubt to be the most effective tool to controlling and suppressing the virus until we find a vaccine.
Bojo panicked because he has no plan at all, and never had one, he “wings it” and is a populist, and thus only knows how to follow. That is what populists do. They follow. This is not some hitherto hidden aspect of him. He is, by his very nature, a compulsive liar and renowned Spaffer of taxpayers money, are you seriously surprised a man who said “fuck business” would wreck the economy? Seriously?
The guy who said “fuck business” wrecked the economy. Wow, if only there was some kind of sign, some kind of hint!
No one could have foreseen it, not even Nostradamus!
No shit, Sherlock.
You are Jeremy Corbyn and I claim my prize.
Glaza–to paraphrase Molyneux–rambling is not an argument.
This explains (partly) the howls of outrage when a church-group with local volunteers managed to get their very-obvious field-hospital set up in New York’s Central Park before any level of government could get anything similarly worthy of a front-page above-the-fold newspaper photograph put together.
I know people have a lot of time on their hands right now but responding to this person is not a good way of spending it.
It is noticeable, comparing testing in Germany, the UK and the US, that early involvement of the private sector in test development is good whereas command&control approaches by state organisations set up to handle these things tend to be late and inadequate. As the US CDC has already demonstrated the latter effect, I do not feel it is necessary for the UK to provide an additional confirming example.
John (April 17, 2020 at 3:06 pm), yes indeed. However, I’ve already pointed that out, complete with a summary of what my checking verified, but if people have time on their hands it seems they lack enough of it to click such links. 🙂 I only did the legwork because Snorri raised the question – but now feel I would have done better to follow more strictly my own advice in those links. 🙂
Politicians giving themselves £10,000 of taxpayer to stay at home, while failing to give nurses anything.
The delay of May elections means local politicians have awarded themselves an extra unearned yearly salary, a lot of earn a lot more than MPs.
Can you explain why the government is covering up the care home deaths, then?
I can explain it – they aren’t covering it up at all – and the rest of your diatribe is tripe.
It isn’t just an urge to “Do something!” although that’s bad enough. Governments have an urge to command, control, and prohibit as the things they do, because that feeds their power-addiction and polishes their tyrant-boners.
Also as ruler types tyrant harder and break more stuff they can lie and insist on more power. Cyclical….
Gary still TLDR.
Some people in politics have come out of this well.
I have a lot of differences with Congressman Thomas Massie – but it took real courage to oppose the Bailout orgy, courage that no one else in the House of Representatives had.
Also the Governor of South Dakota and a handful of other Governors have made a stand or basic liberties – they have shown themselves to be human beings.
But most people in politics, and outside it to, do not show up so well – especially in the United Kingdom.
This is the land of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume and Jeremy Bentham – of no rights AGAINST the state.