Blah Blah

lol Spartacus. On Covid itself, it is going to take around two years to have the required data to determine immunity and lasting damage to those who recover from it. None of this is simple where you have so many protracted tangents, around age, underlying health conditions and the ever present unknowns around mutation. We are only six months into this pandemic, although it may feel like forever already. Vaccines take years, have always taken years, and politicians were wrong to not explain that. I can understand the desire to give the public hope of a way out, but there also needs to be some honesty around this. The real indicators will probably come in the Autumn, if there is a second spike, and if those who have previously had the virus and recovered, become ill again. We really do need intensive monitoring of all of this to understand as much as possible. The USA clearly shows that the virus is just as prevalent in Summer seasons, but that social distancing does work to keep infection rates down. In Winter, when people are coughing and sneezing from seasonal colds and chest infections, we will HAVE to ramp up the use of face coverings everywhere if we are going to prevent a significant second wave.

We are trying to get it together to see this too. Apparently a NW direction two hours before sunrise is the best time to see it. That's from a google search so if anyone knows differently.....

I think you make a sensible point Rollflick around the perception of the kerb vs road. Only when there is no hierarchy between the two, does the space become genuinely shared. Pedestrians automatically check a road before stepping onto it in the main. This encourages an automatic right of way to continue to exist in the minds of some cyclists. SO that has to be addressed I think. Cyclists who don't want to engage in the shared space mantra can still use the surrounding roads in the normal way.

KK, I am going to say it. You are being hysterical and worse than that, dismissing my objective experience as someone who cycles up and down Rye Lane most days. The thing about shared spaces is that they are just that. A random meandering of different users. It often looks chaotic when actually it is not. Have there been a run of collisions on the far more densely shared stretch at the top of Rye Lane over the years? No there haven't. What there has been however, are a lot of cyclists and pedestrians alike, complaining about having their assumed right of way impeded. The reality is that for any complaint, pretty much all shared space users observe an appropriate caution they would not otherwise. If they didn't, shared spaces would never work anywhere. All the evidence however shows they quite clearly do.

Cue the usual hysteria about cyclists. I cycled both ways along the lane this afternoon. It was absolutely fine.

It is reported today that three pubs have had to close immediately again after customers tested positive for Covid. And therein lies the problem. You just never know who, if anyone, is infected. Enclosed spaces are risky spaces until there is an answer to this virus.

The 80s were a terrible time that led to generational unemployment and a lot of laid off people that never worked again. What happens when the economy contracts with an abundance of available labour? Wages fall, certain groups of people become unemployable, and the welfare bill goes up. So yes, the government has to protect as many jobs as possible but it also is facing the deepest possible impacts of Brexit if there is no deal, and Tory governments have never been great at protecting the worst impacted before (squeezing the poorest and baiting working people against them for example), so why should we expect anything different this time? If I were them, I would do as much as possible now to protect what already exists, and moving forward, look at ways at supporting others into self employment (with grants, low interest loans and mentoring), training and education. And that needs to be a programme of investments for ALL ages, not just young people. Similarly, I would also argue for better support for small business, better support for home grown innovation and talent, along with the usual international incentives to being jobs to the UK. It is going to need ALL of those things to redirect the economy as quickly as possible. My concern is that investment is primarily aimed at infrastructure, with the same handful of government favoured business pals getting the lucrative contracts. The expectation that if you build a highway, private enterprise will follow is no longer true. We've been relying on that idea for the last 40 years and we have been simply left with disenfranchised regions. There needs to be a radical change of approach, one that invests in people (over concrete) and incentivises employers to do so also.

People already walk out onto the road to avoid other people so this makes sense I guess. It might help bars and restaurants too, if they can put tables outside in nice weather.

And this is precisely why there are problems around politicians managing public health. Politicians are constantly thinking of how to stay or get elected. This skews everything. A second wave is coming. I think every agrees on that. How bad or easy it is to manage, will be entirely down to government preparations, but the spin almost certainly will seek to pit the people against the people, just as it always does. Be that left vs right, poor vs deserving poor, class division or those who abide by the rules, and those who don't. This government are experts at it. It is how they conned people into voting for Brexit after all. Easing lockdown and reopening businesses where people can not socially distance effectively was always going to be difficult to be fair. And come the winter, when people can not eat and drink outside, what happens then? Many pubs are not even abiding by the government rules requiring contact details to be taken. Why? Because it is difficult to do that with people who are drinking on pavements only. You only have to look at the pictures of Soho last night to see why that might be. Anyone who has served in a busy bar knows how faffing about with registration forms was never going to work in the UK.

SpringTime Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I'm also for higher taxes. Stuck with me for the > better part of 30 years when a teacher told me > "this country needs the f****** sh** taxed out of > it" - sounded extreme at the time but keeps making > more and more sense. Happy to be schooled by > anyone in the know but as I remember things the > French were taxed proper from the early 1980s and > look at the difference now between France and the > UK. It's embarrassing. There's so much scorn for > public services here, and at the same time some > people seem to want Scandinavian levels of > provision on US levels of tax. Doesn't work, > sorry. An even better comparison is with the Nordic countries. Sweden has very high tax but Finland has an income tax rate that comes in at about 32%. It has the lowest tax gap in Europe (people actually pay more tax than they need to) and its standard of living is much better for everyone. It also has much better unemployment support and has eradicated homelessness. It can be done.

Effra Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Blah Blah Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > >When are we going to have a government > > that builds the homes we actually need, over > > investment opportunities for the private > sector. > They get it from taxes. Do you want higher taxes > or do you want your children and grand children to > pay it back, with interest on top? Yes I would support higher taxes so that families don't have to live in a single room in bed and breakfast. I would pay higher taxes so that people don't have to burn to death in tower blocks clad with unsafe materials (so much for the building regs you cite btw). There have (I believe) been three meaningful waves of social and council home building that all addressed housing crisis at the time. In the 70's, most households lived in council housing, until they could afford to buy. We have become too reliant on a private rental sector that makes saving a deposit impossible for most working people. There should be a balance and government can deliver that with the right investment and regulation. We have had it that way before after all.

That makes perfect sense Siduhe.

Yes, it is smoke and mirrors, to enable Boris to sound like he is delivering on manifesto pledges, when in reality he is not. Most of the investment is staggered over 12 years too, so it waters down pretty fast. And nowhere in any of that is a pledge to maintain what formerly were EU grants to the poorest regions (worth around ?4bn a year). In addition, most of the investment is set up to directly benefit government cronies who will profit from the contracts. Housing especially is worth scrutinising. No effort to address the real issue of affordability. Once again, setting up the market for yet more homes for sale at market prices. When are we going to have a government that builds the homes we actually need, over investment opportunities for the private sector.

ianr Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > > And the WHO, of course, colluded > > by NOT slapping on an air travel ban > > What authority would they have to do so? The WHO have no authority to tell any country to do anything. All they can do is advise and provide resources. The general consensus is that by the time the virus was detected, it was already firmly spread, meaning that an immediate air travel ban would likely have changed very little.

But Covid is NOT a conspiracy theory Uncleglen. It is a zoonotic virus transmission, that has led to a global pandemic, that has killed half a million people in just six months. So lets leave the conspiracy nonsense at the bin where it belongs. On pubs. I can see all kinds of issues, that only get worse once people are drunk. Better managed in Summer, impossible to manage in Winter. Around a quarter of pubs can not open at all, unable to enforce any kind of social distancing, and then there is the issue of people giving their names and other details. Some won't want to do it, or will give false data. Even with the majority of the public complying with lock down measures, that R number hasn't got much below 1 so far. So we will have to see how it goes.

But migrants ARE the scapegoat. Brexit was entirely fought on that basis. You can see the same backlash across Europe, in countries like Poland and Hungary, exacerbated by the Syrian War and the refugee crisis born from that. And just as with the rise of Hitler, the collapse of economies raises the notion of anyone considered an outsider, being pushed out of the system.

The genuine hard left would be those to subscribe to the ideas around revolutionary communism PK. Anarchists who want to smash the capitalist system and install pure socialism for example, and think achieving that by force if necessary, is a valid position to take. What typifies those on both ends of the political spectrum is the rejection of consensus. Ideologues have no place for that usually.

I don't think the center failed Springtime, I think this is always the pattern after a global financial crash. Even localised recessions open the door to the fringes of the political spectrum, where ideas that belong to the edges begin to seep into the mainstream. These are always crucial times, which at their most anarchic, lead to revolutions, or war. And the pattern is always the same. As economies struggle, migrants become the first scapegoats. Then comes the attack on foreign trade and a return to protectionism. We are already seeing that. Resurgence of nationalism then comes too which draws out polarised battles between political extremes. It happened in 1906. It happened in 1929. And it has happened in 2008. Take a look at the decade that followed all of those major economic contractions, and the same pattern emerges. And the Pandemic is about to sink the entire world into a recession. Have a think about what that means. Major unemployment. More refugees and economic migrants desperate to find a better existence, at the very time countries are lifting their drawbridges. Will nations work together to get economies going again, or will it be every nation for herself? The thing that caused the 2008 crisis is the very same thing that led to the 1929 crisis. It was not the center ground that took us there, but the greed of the libertarian free market. The removal of all the regulations put in place after 1929, in the mad belief that speculators and city traders wouldn't make the same mistakes again! The removal of the Glass Steagall Act by Clinton being the biggest mistake of all. There is a lot wrong with our financial systems. But there is even more wrong with our aversion to regulation.

People are not allowed to have sensible middle of the road opinion anymore. On the one side, you have right wing bigots (like Uncle) calling anyone who challenges them hard left (nonsense). And then you do have a genuine hard left who are equally intolerant to any criticism of their views. These people are in a minority, but they bark very loudly at the moment, because they are emboldened by populist charlatans that have stolen mainstream parties and found their way to government. This will crash and burn in the same way it always does eventually.

And that is the usual diatribe of those on the political fringes of opinion Effra. Instead of asking why their views are so offensive, they sneer at those correctly pointing out the offense. Bigotry will always be shunned by the mainstream for good reason. Racism, xenophobia, etc for the same reasons. Encouraging a bigot like Uncle to 'sock it to them' is everything that is wrong with the world.

Yes I can agree Mrs Brown's Boys isn't that funny Spartacus ;) It feels very dated to me but my cousin loves it, so there is an audience for it. This is where it is impossible to avoid the complexity of all of this. Drag and especially pantomime drag, feeds into the gender constructs that for example, render older women as unattractive and/or invisible (irregardless of whether they actually are or not). But it is complex because in many family units, the eldest female is the matriarch, who often rules the roost. So we often also see the matriarch as a character in drag. This is where Mrs Brown's Boys sits. And what part does the history of theater play too? Men historically have played female roles, and not always as a form of satire either. Similarly, the theaters of Victorian England had many an impersonator. Women who assumed the character of wandering dandies, or city gents, whilst singing a song or two. There is also the further layer of sexual orientation. In a culture where homosexuality was illegal, theater was often the safest environment for those who did not fit into any heteronormative norm. The same was true for all kinds of people outcast for all kinds of reasons. There is no one answer to your question on degradation Spartacus, for all of those reasons. Feminists would argue that men ridicule women they do not find attractive, and there is some truth to that. Neuroscience now has research that suggests we are hardwired as a species to have aversion to faces we do not find asymmetrical for example, even when we are not trying to display any aversion. And it had been understood for a long time that our DNA is wired to seek out seemingly physically healthy partners. How does that play on a gender basis? There are nuanced differences there, but all genders have aversion indicators. So there are some biological things underlying some unconscious bias. Because it is unconscious, can we ever be entirely free of it? In my opinion, there are things that can definitely be tackled, like inequality of opportunity. We can ask the questions around upward social mobility, but the answers will often draw on a wide range of inequalities that go beyond ethnicity, gender etc. Answering the question of how to stop unconscious bias however, is impossible to answer. And I would also say that culture aversion is just as strong a factor in unconscious bias. We never really talk about culture in debates around racism, but we should.

Whataboutery!

DulwichBorn&Bred Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > A really good watch and educational: The school > that tried to end racism. > https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-school-tha > t-tried-to-end-racism I thought this programme was thought provoking (in a good way). What I found most interesting is how the already established differing levels of confidence affected the thought process of the kids. But I also came away with hope. Children are far smarter than we sometimes give them credit for, and at that age, they have a simple approach to life that says everything must make logical sense. That is a key impetus of learning at that age anyway. I really liked the way the programme sought to empower everyone around their culture and identity. The key to ending racism is exactly that - finding value in our own culture and identity, as much as others. Tackling inequality in turn, is then something everyone can work together on.

Yes I second that. Isolation is particularly challenging for alcoholics. Socially distanced counselling isn't going to be enough probably. You could try contacting the community mental health team on Lordship Lane. https://www.together-uk.org/southwark-wellbeing-hub/the-directory/8650/cmht-lordship-lane-dulwich/ They are likely to know best what help is available at the moment for someone in his circumstances. Also, he can get a referral to them from his GP if he has one. All CMHT's have crisis teams, so I suggest you ask to speak directly with someone from that. It sounds to me as though he needs some kind of outreach visit to assess his needs. That he confided in you is a good sign that he is willing to get back to the recovery stage he was at. So I would stress that it would possibly be productive for any resources to be made available to him.