A No to Nato rally at Conway Hall on 25 February, at which I was due to speak, has been cancelled after the venue received threats and abuse online that made them concerned both for staff safety and for funding.
This is just another symptom of the serious threat to free speech in modern society. In fact we are now at the stage where we might say free speech has already been lost.
Neither state nor corporate media would give any space to the views likely to have been expressed at Conway Hall. The war raging in Europe is not allowed to be discussed in any terms, other than as a straightforward conflict between good and evil, with the West as the good guy and Russia as the evil.
Social media posts saying anything else are rigorously suppressed. Because of the successful creation of corporate gatekeeper sites like Facebook and Twitter, the readership of this article will be at a quarter the level of a year ago, due to rigorous suppression of my posts linking here.
Now my position on the Ukraine war is a great deal more nuanced than most of the speakers at the No to NATO debate. I oppose NATO because it is an agent of neo-imperialism and a mechanism for the diversion of huge amounts of resources to the super rich, via the arms and military industries.
But I am plain that while provoked, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia was nonetheless illegal in international law. I view those who regard Putin as a defender of democracy or of workers’ rights as seriously deluded.
Putin is a very bad man, and the West is only just achieving the levels of wealth inequality that Russia has experienced (with a push from the West) these last three decades. The oligarchs and military industrial complex rip off the ordinary man in Russia, just as in the West.
This is a disaster for the people of Ukraine, for the people of Russia and for the people of the World. It is going to end with Crimea absorbed into Russia and some kind of autonomous status inside Ukraine for the Donbass regions.
That outcome could have been agreed without war, before thousands had to die and millions be impoverished. It could be agreed today. All the death and destruction and weapons systems will achieve nothing – except massive profits for the wealthy.
Responsible politicians would stop the fighting now. But no politician sees a personal interest in doing anything other than escalating and pouring in more and more weapons systems to mince human flesh.
I worry hugely about the abysmal quality of public debate. I am not sure whether bad education, social media or a race to the bottom in broadcast and print media – which are mostly about commentators not about news – are most to blame.
But quality of thought and depth of understanding are abandoned almost entirely in what passes for public debate in favour of risible extremist positions.
Ukraine is one example, where we have an establishment view that NATO and Ukraine are perfect, that there was no constant pre-invasion shelling of Russian speaking civilians or banning of Russian oriented political parties or the Russian language and publications, and definitely no Nazi influence in the Ukrainian armed forces.
Then you have those brave enough to suggest a counter view, but who claim that Putin is perfect and Russia a workers’ paradise, that all Ukrainians are Nazis, that there are no Ukrainians in the Donbass, and that Russia is only prevented by self-restraint from total military victory.
These are both ideological positions which are self-evidently ludicrous, but the first is in fact adopted by Western governments and the entire mainstream media.
I find I receive continual abuse from both sides for not adopting one crazed narrative or the other.
The market for reason has become very small.
On three current major controversies – Ukraine, covid and trans rights, debate is extraordinarily polarised, and the slightest deviation from the official narrative is heresy. Those who see themselves as heretics despise all but their own, equally extreme, interpretation.
On Covid, the official narrative is that it was a uniquely devastating virus and that humankind was only saved from a serious disaster by a combination of ruthless lockdown and revolutionary vaccines.
On the other side we have those who believe Covid was an engineered virus designed to make a fortune for big pharma and to justify government measures to reduce civil liberties, and that the vaccines are themselves deadly.
Personally, I believe neither of these opposing narratives.
My own view is that covid-19 is a respiratory disease which, in its initial outbreak, was similarly lethal, or possibly a little worse, than one of the major flu pandemics. The “Hong Kong flu” of 1968/9 I vividly remember. I knew a healthy child who died of Hong Kong flu, and my whole family caught it.
The Hong Kong flu killed an estimated 1 to 4 million people worldwide. The famous Spanish flu pandemic from 1919 killed an estimated 25 million.
To say covid-19 was similar to a flu pandemic is not to downplay it: they are terrible things.
The Covid-19 pandemic killed, according to Wikipedia which is curated very close to the official line on these matters, about 6.7 million people – about a quarter of the number killed by the Spanish flu. According to the same source, without vaccines it would have killed about 17 million more, which would be about the same as the Spanish flu.
Although of course the Spanish flu still killed a much larger proportion than Covid-19 of the world’s then much smaller population. Indeed as a percentage of population killed, covid-19 is not out of the same league as the Hong Kong flu of 1968/9.
So Covid-19 is a very nasty virus, which also may have more debilitating long term effects than generally associated with a flu pandemic, but not dissimilar in its mortality rate.
There are difficulties in collating the statistics. The figures for historic flus are not very reliable. The practice of treating as covid-19 deaths anybody who died with the disease, when they actually died of something else, is also perplexing.
If you look at excess deaths (above the 5 year rolling average), it is undoubtedly true that at the minute excess deaths are as high in the UK as at the height of the covid-19 outbreak before the vaccine programme, even though only 5% of current deaths involve covid.
It is also true that they were this high in January 2015 and, in both cases, a severe winter flu paid a role. The official narrative to explain the current death toll features heavily health problems caused by lack of access to medical treatment during lockdown.
Some of my own views on covid-19 are these. The pandemic was comparable to a nasty flu pandemic. The panic caused went beyond the rational, and governments were involved in pumping that up. There was little danger to the young and to healthy mature adults, but real danger to the elderly and unwell.
Accordingly I believe lockdown was too severe and should better have focused on shielding the easily identified vulnerable, rather than placing harsh and unnecessary restrictions on the large majority in society.
There could have been massive infrastructure, physical, moral and psychological support offered by the state to those who needed to shield. Rather than lock down everybody else. Closing universities for example was completely unnecessary.
Just like all pandemics before it, the covid-19 virus is busily following its own self-interest by mutating into a less vicious form that can co-exist more comfortably with its host.
I welcome vaccines as long as they are voluntary. Medical science of course makes mistakes but in general has been a massive force for good. The argument that covid-19 vaccines are a fundamental threat to the world’s health seems to have as little evidence behind it as the argument that covid-19 was such a threat that economies had to be fundamentally harmed.
Vaccines should be voluntary and no sanctions imposed for not taking them. But I regard taking the vaccine, and sharing in any associated risk as well as any associated benefit from herd immunity, as the correct moral position.
I do not claim that I am uniquely right or particularly expect you to agree with me. But I am not in either of the two binary camps.
I am not in the camp that supported every authoritarian crackdown and wanted to put anyone in jail who did not wear a mask, nor in the camp that thinks it was all a sinister government plot.
As with Ukraine I urge you not to switch off your brain and join one “camp” or the other “camp”. Do not sign up to a pre-ordained set of opinions.
Forge your own opinions.
The other issue I want to explore today, on which what passes for “thinking” appears ridiculously polarised, is that of trans rights.
On the one side we have people who argue that it is an inalienable human right to live in the gender of your choice, and that all societal institutions and infrastructure must be organised around that individual choice, which may never be questioned or subjected to scrutiny.
On the other side we have people who argue that sex is immutable and determined at birth, that safe spaces and positive discrimination provisions for women are dependent on strict application of biological sex, and that much of the trans movement is motivated by sexual perversion.
A lack of any willingness to try and synthesise rights and obligations, and take account of the desires and motives of others, seems the defining characteristic of almost everybody actively engaged in this debate.
My own starting point is a libertarian one. I believe people should behave as they wish to behave and be treated as they wish to be treated, wherever possible, and that people should be kind to one another.
Therefore, if somebody presents themselves to me as male or female, I shall treat them as such in society. That seems to me polite. It is not for me to check their genitals, much less to make a judgment on their aesthetic appearance.
I am frequently challenged over this and asked, do I believe that a man can actually become a woman? The answer to which is, that I neither know nor care. It is a matter of human interaction. Life is not a science exam.
The debate is currently focused on Adam Graham aka Isla Bryson, a convicted double rapist who is currently held in a female prison in Scotland, having declared himself a trans woman.
It is worth noting that this has happened not under Scotland’s new Gender Recognition Reform legislation, which is not in force, but under existing UK wide legislation, as interpreted by the Scottish Prisons Service under Justice Minister Keith Brown.
I have to confess, this seems to me self-evidently ludicrous.
There are no absolute rights in our society, beyond the right to breathe. The state can incarcerate you and effectively remove all your rights, for criminal acts or if you are dangerously insane.
That rights are not immutable meets with general acceptance.
I see no reason why trans rights should be different. Anybody who chooses to rape women will lose a lot of rights. They will be incarcerated. Subsequently they will be on a register and unable to live in certain locations, and barred from certain employments.
It seems to me entirely sensible that a rapist or sexual assaulter of women should lose the right to transition in law to another gender. It should be amongst those societal rights they forfeit by their heinous act.
The problem is, this kind of practical approach is unacceptable to both extreme ideologies.
On the one hand, you have those that believe that some people have a right, that may never be gainsaid, to an inner gender identity only they can identify, and that their sincerity may never be questioned.
On the other hand, you have those who believe that everybody should be forced to live a gender role determined by their physical characteristics, whether they want to or not, and no matter if they never hurt anybody in trying to do the opposite.
I am very conscious that it is wrong always to discuss this matter in terms of sexual offence, and the very large majority of trans people are entirely peaceful and innocent.
But that itself is why banning rapists and other serious sexual offenders from changing gender does not affect the principle: a few serious criminals are nothing to do with genuine trans people.
I find some of the “debate” simply baffling. I am sorry I cannot find it now, but I saw one tweet from a lady who had used a unisex toilet and was horrified to have to walk behind the back of somebody using a urinal.
Has she never left the UK? What is offensive about a man’s back? The extraordinary thing is, there were scores upon scores of replies about how disgusting it was to walk past a urinal.
I find myself genuinely baffled by this and by what has become an entire sub-genre about potential behaviour by trans women in changing rooms and toilets, where all of the projected behaviours would remain criminal with or without a gender recognition certificate.
I don’t claim any expertise or genius on the subject. I reject the strange absolutism of both extremist positions.
I do not accept either that we are forced to live in a role according to our physical make-up, nor that a professed personal gender identity may never be queried for sincerity in a criminal.
In comments two articles ago I was called both a transphobe and a pro-trans hater of women, by gender extremists on either side over the same article.
Now on none of these three issues did I set out by looking at varying positions of different camps and trying to find a middle ground. I simply considered the arguments on Ukraine, on Covid and on trans rights on their merits, and came to my views as the best policies for achieving maximum human happiness in difficult situations.
In doing so I find myself at odds with public discourse on both subjects which revolves around clearly defined camps, holding sets of received opinions and arguments to which they stick, and intolerant of anybody who does not subscribe to the same set.
This is a sorry state of public discussion, made much worse by the fact that in each case the government, media and ruling establishment is entirely signed up to one of the binary camps, and itself refuses to entertain any debate or nuance.
Indeed, those who query the Establishment line on any of these issues are subjected to ridicule, ostracism and even legal threat. That may be one reason why opposition is itself so unsubtle in its response.
It is also the case that on all these arguments people become angry, exasperated or impatient that anybody should hold a different view to their own.
The idea that reasonable, well-motivated people need not agree on everything and may agree to disagree on certain issues, is a fundamental basis of a tolerant society. It is an increasingly rare value.
I find that the market for nuance is small, and diminishing.
I want to stress again I am not claiming I have everything right. But I am claiming I have thought through the facts and arguments for myself, as best I can.
I hope this is of some assistance to you in doing the same.
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Russia not invited to commemoration of Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz tomorrow (Jan 27).
Germany, who operated the mass death camp, will be there.
Director of site says Moscow ‘will need an extremely long time and very deep self-examination’ before it could possibly return to attending ‘gatherings of the civilised world’.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/auschwitz-museum-russia-not-invited-to-event-marking-camps-liberation-by-red-army/
At this time last year I read a post on a website – possibly this one. It challenged readers to listen to upcoming broadcasts about the liberation of Auschwitz and predicted little or no mention of the role of the Red Army.
I listened on the morning to both BBC’s Today programme and Good Morning Scotland, its equivalent in my city.
Sure enough news coverage on neither (that I heard), mentioned the Red Army. However. Radio Scotland’s , “God Slot“ DID credit them.
The speaker? Rabbi Pete Tobias of Glasgow.
“Putin is a very bad man”. IMO an infantile statement. What do you base this on ? And, if you are defining ‘badness’ you have to, I believe, equate this relative to others (Blair, Bush, Obama, etc.) to see if Putin is better or worse. Putin is no saint, he’s a canny politician and IMO, as a leader he is head and shoulders above the morons that mismanage the West. Yes, I’m a bit of a Putin fan boy !
“On three current major controversies – Ukraine, covid and trans rights”. You forget Climate !
Putin is a conservative nationalist whose main aim seems to be to defend his country. He is dislikeable because of the macho image – e.g. riding bare-back and bare-chested. But a leader should be judged by his acts, not by his personal habits. I agree that the acts aren’t worse than what the Americans do, though as Craig says the invasion of Ukraine was illegal. So was the US invasion of Iraq, to speak of just one of the most heinous of US illegalities. I don’t see why they should be treated differently.
There is rampant Russophobia going on here, which is not much different from the wave of Russophobia which drove the Crimean War (the 1854-56 one), and many crises since. Russian troops are not going to be arriving at Dover with snow on their boots. It’s more understandable with the Poles and other East Europeans, but that’s the point: the West’s liberty is not in danger. It is only a local conflict, being magnified by the US for its own purposes (those of the Military-Industrial Complex, I imagine), but expressed as national policy.
Going by what he says, Putin is a conservative nationalist whose main aim seems to be to restore his empire to its fullest extent. Some of his acolytes believe that the very nature of an empire means it must continue to expand.
The last time there was a free vote on the future status of the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was in 1991 they all voted to become parts of an independent Ukraine.
Expansion of empire is your imagination. Putin has said the opposite.
Then what does Putin mean when he speaks of restoration of “the Russian world”, referring to the Tsarist and Soviet empires?
For wider and wilder and more eccentric views take a look at Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Russia-1.
There was an assumption that an independent Ukraine would retain its ties to Russia, which did continue in one form or another. 2014 changed all that. As Putin has stated, without the 2014 (illegal USA backed) Maidan coup there would have been “nothing, nothing”. There is no good evidence to disbelieve that statement.
“The last time there was a free vote on the future status of the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was in 1991 they all voted to become parts of an independent Ukraine.”
In what way was that vote any more free than subsequent votes where Crimea voted for independence from Ukraine and was ignored? Because it returned the “right” answer?
Because it was supervised by outside observers and conducted by a known electorate.
The 2014 and 2022 referendums weren’t secret ballots and many voters were not on any register of voters. Many that had the right to vote were deported or had fled; others had moved in from Russia just in time to vote.
“Because it was supervised by outside observers and conducted by a known electorate.”
As were the 2022 referendums, just not outside observers employed by the West. There is a suspiciously high correlation between “free and fair” elections and referendums and those that return the result that the West approves of. As Tom Lehrer put it back in the 50s,
“They’ve got to be protected,
All their rights respected,
Until someone we like can get elected”.
“The 2014 and 2022 referendums weren’t secret ballots ”
Any evidence for that?
At least a third of people in Ukraine, and big majority of inhabitants of Crimea, Donets, Luhansk, Zaporishia, Kherson and at least two other regions speak Russian and do not share “admiration of NATO” and Russophobic sentiments of Western Ukrainians. At the time of the “last free vote on the status”, Ukrainian constitution guaranteed equal rights to Ukrainian and Russian languages and culture, and NEUTRALITY. Communist, socialist and “pro-Russian” parties were legal etc.
So at that time, the difference between breaking Ukraine and keeping it all was more administrative than political, and as Russia had equally chaotic period as Ukraine, there were few reasons to change. But all the reasons for voting to stay in Ukraine were removed one by one. Especially after 2014, there was continual increase of repressions and oppressions toward “vatniks”, derogatory term for Russian speakers, elimination of Russian from the public life AND education on ALL levels, banning political parties and media, repression for using “Communist” or Russian symbols, the works.
Needless to say, calling the resulting political system a “democracy” is a malicious re-definition of the word as “adherence to ever changing rules of the rule based world order”.
Imagine that there was a referendum deciding if Ireland should stay whole or not, and the constitution offered equal rights to Irish speakers and followers of different religions, so the majority in all counties would vote for unity, but in time, any public function, including that of a sales clerk, would require the ability to communicate in Irish, Catholicism would become the sole legal religion and Irish Inquisition would persecute the Protestant infidels. And no recognized referendum for the change of status would be allowed.
“a referendum deciding if Ireland should stay whole or not”
Er….
Which universe do you live in?
In fact, under the constitution of Ireland (meaning the state calling itself Ireland) the ability to use the Irish language was a requirement for every public worker. Formally, it may still be. For many years the Russian Orthodox church was the the sole legal religion in Ukraine and was enthusiastic about persecuting heretics.
As for Russian-speaking Ukrainians, as a former one put it, “On February 24th I suffered an injury which made me completely unable to understand Russian.”
“Which universe do you live in?”
Did the words “Imagine that” completely pass you by or are you unfamiliar with the idea of imagining scenarios to test ideas?
Wee Jim: The last time there was a free vote on the future status of the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was in 1991 they all voted to become parts of an independent Ukraine.
According to WIkipedia, on the 1991 Crimea vote, that is not correct.
“The referendum did not just call for the restoration for the ASSR [The Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic], but further called for Crimea to be a participant in the New Union Treaty – an ultimately futile attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to reconstitute the USSR. This would have meant that Crimea would have been a sovereign subject of the renewed USSR[7] and separate from the Ukrainian SSR”
That was in January 1991.
It’s confusing. There were three referendums that year. In March there was a referendum throughout the USSR on whether the they agreed “that Ukraine should be part of a Union of Soviet sovereign states on the basis on the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine”, which gave Ukraine its own armed forces, its own bank and currency and gave Ukrainian law precedence over the laws of the USSR (which was already falling apart). What effect that “Union of Soviet sovereign states” could have had on its members is also questionable. The vote for independence took place in December after there’d been steadily increasing support for independence. 54% of the voters (37% of the electorate) supported Ukrainian independence in December.
Certainly everybody concerned – Ukrainian, Russian, Crimean – made a pig’s ear of it and the fact that there were no allowances made for the Crimea’s situation led to disaster, but the Crimea is dependent on the rest of Ukraine for so many things makes separation impossible economically. No-one seems to have considered the best – possibly only sensible – situation, the position of the Åland Islands as part of Sweden, as a basis for the future.
“The last time there was a free vote on the future status of the Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson was in 1991 they all voted to become parts of an independent Ukraine.”
Wrong. Upon the dissolution of the Soviet Uniion, Crimeans voted to be independent. Ukraine rolled the troops in and annexed the place.
As for “free” votes, I very much doubt that almost two generations later, the East would vote to be ruled by Kiev, which is even more criminal and corrupt than Moscow. Google median household income for both from 2013 onward and tell me which government you’d rather be ruled by. Ukraine’s government spokesmen made it very plain what they felt about Musk’s idea of giving the residents any say in who ruled them, which I think gives a fair indication of how popular Kiev is in those regions.
I might add that Russia also isn’t pushing racial supremacist themes that will alienate a large percentage of Ukraine’s citizens. Most sensible people would rather live in peace with their countrymen; Ukraine’s neoNazis have made that impossible.
Wee Jim you’ve confused the RF with the US.
So, the USA has invaded and occupied parts of Ukraine1?
Why did no-one tell us?
Bayard: so what Peter Berman meant was “Imagine that there was a united Ireland and then imagine that there was a referendum deciding if Ireland should stay whole or not, and the constitution offered equal rights to Irish speakers and followers of different religions, so the majority in all counties would vote for unity, but in time, any public function, including that of a sales clerk, would require the ability to communicate in Irish, Catholicism would become the sole legal religion and Irish Inquisition would persecute the Protestant infidels. And no recognized referendum for the change of status would be allowed.”
Presumably you think it’s a good idea to imagine a scenario in which to imagine another scenario in which to test ideas – or do you favour a few more scenarios?
As I pointed out, the Irish constitution made knowledge of the Irish obligatory for many government jobs and privileged the roman catholic church, which – to fair to it – was less hostile to other religions than the Russian orthodox church..
Absolutely
I pretty much agree with most of what Craig is saying here, but with respect to the Covid response it may be of some interest that when the Great Barrington Declaration was published (which I felt made some very sensible suggestions), an article was published in The Guardian accusing the authors of this declaration and those who supported it of all being ‘right-wing extremists’.
Feeling the absurdity of this position, I posted a comment saying that it was ridiculous to frame this as a right/left issue, and that to do so was to engage in US style ‘identity politics’ and had nothing to do with real politics at all. My comment was immediately censored. I long ago stopped sending comments to their web site as everything that I wish to raise is somehow deemed unacceptable and immediately taken down. However, this does reveal that a very strange agenda was being promoted about Covid and I would be most interested to know exactly what that agenda was (is).
Discussion and disagreement is disinformation and is not tolerated in our democratic, freedom loving, free speech Nirvana.
It is an interesting fact that in the UK, and most western regimes, the military and security services have been employed against the citizens to ensure that only the regime agenda is promoted. This happened with Skripal, Brexit, Covid, Scotland, the Ukraine and Climate to mention six.
If everything is kosher, why can’t we freely discuss it ?
The smear campaign against Corbyn makes seven.
I believe the problem has something to do with consumerism. It is implicitly opposed to intellectual thought as superfluous to the pursuit of material gain. Further the selfish individualism it creates leads people to assume the views that align with their self-interest; that this requires a level of cognitive dissonance reinforces pyschologically a need to avoid considering issues objectively as this will undermine the self-integrity of the individual.
The controversy around “Climate” is deliberately(?) mis-framed. The big lie isn’t whether Climate Change is real or a conspiracy, but whether the “plan” (greenwashing) will have any effect at all. The “Green Economy” has become a massive source of revenue and “growth”, but there is little to no reason to believe it will change the outcome. The pro/anti-Climate debate is just a distraction to allow financiers to make a killing on all our deaths, while “supporters” of Climate Change can point fingers at “deniers”.
“The controversy around “Climate” is deliberately(?) mis-framed. The big lie isn’t whether Climate Change is real or a conspiracy, but whether the “plan” (greenwashing) will have any effect at all. ”
It’s worse than that. Climate change is a naturally occurring process that has been going on since the world began. The climate has always changed and always will. This is not to be confused with anthropogenic climate change, which obviously could only have occurred since the advent of civilisation. It is impossible to deny the former without looking a complete fool, which is why it is thus referred to.
Thank you for this. I agree completely with your overall point. You are either on the side of the angels or a Putin footsoldier (like the nurses!) To Ukraine I would add the hypocrisy and lack of self awareness of us condemning a country for invading another. But that would be a Putin talking point.
On Covid I don’t agree: surely it doesn’t matter if Covid was unique or not. And IMO your numbers don’t work: with Spanish Flu they didn’t have oxygen masks, intensive care, oxygen blood monitors etc.. With them there might well have been fewer deaths. So if Covid has the same number of deaths, but with improved health care, then it is a worse disease. (For what it matters.)
At the beginning of the Covid scare, no one knew how bad it would be. It hit Italy badly and we could have locked down then but didn’t. Prime minister on holiday, no preparation for mass infection, a run-down health service, that sort of thing. But lockdown did stop infection, as shown by the two relaxations – eat out, and save Christmas – each followed by a massive increase in deaths. And all through it there was a general level of deceit and incompetence (and more deceit) that is still unbelievable.
Your statistical point about people dying “with” Covid rather “from” it – yes, but this is offset by people dying of, say, a heart attack, three months after getting Covid who are not counted as a Covid death even though it might have been the cause or contributory. – And yes, stopping young people doing things when they didn’t get ill is hard to justify, from the minute it became clear: unless they all had grandparents at home of course.
With COVID vs. influenza, the most important point actually seems to be that the Spanish Flu was exceptional in that its start coincided with the end of the First World War — a time of starvation, poverty, and unusual global transfer of large numbers of severely weakened young men. The trenches and field hospitals of the First World War were an ideal first breeding ground for the new influenza strain, and then the sick soldiers, eager to be joined with their families, returned home and infected them. All this at a time when a war had just been stopped not because of a decisive victory of one side, and not because of the endless suffering of the soldiers, but because the associated economic crisis had reached the point where the suffering of the population in one of the main participating countries (Germany) finally made the politicians force their military to negotiate a peace settlement. So the virus found exceptionally weak victims at the time.
I agree with your view on Craig’s statistical point. As a mathematician, I never found the protests about counting people who die FROM or WITH COVID remotely convincing. This is just a talking point that disappears as soon as you examine it. After a bombing that killed hundreds of people, you count the corpses, and that’s the number of victims. You don’t statistically distinguish between 1) those who were hit directly by the explosion and died immediately, 2) those who were hit by a beam that fell down when a house collapsed due to the explosion, and died three weeks later in hospital, and 3) those who were hit by the explosion just after committing suicide. The reason for this is that the difference between 1 and 2 doesn’t matter, and case 3 is very rare and hard to distinguish from cases 1 and 2. Heck, it doesn’t even matter if we count 4) those who got surgery months after being hit by a car whose driver was distracted by the explosion, and died due to the anaesthesist’s incompetence. Sometimes people make an effort to include case 4, and sometimes nobody does. Usually, some such cases just happen to be included and others don’t. It does not matter so long as their number is negligible compared to the overall deaths.
To put it differently: It’s not normal that hundreds of people die on the same day in a small area. Whenever that happens, you identify the (almost always) unique event or combination of events that caused it, and then the burden of proof changes: Whoever died DURING the event, died FROM the event, except when we KNOW they didn’t.
There were times and places where hospitals had to dispose of corpses in the street, and crematoria and cemeteries had to tell people to try a different city. In those situations, you have a choice: “Yesterday, 523 people died of COVID and 7 died of other causes. Today, 2134 people died, including a doctor, two nurses, and a receptionist. Of these 2134 deaths, there are 46 cases where COVID is known to have been the obvious cause of death, and 3 who apparently didn’t have COVID at all. Nobody really remembers anything about the others; in retrospect, the entire day is a blur. What do I put into the official statistic of COVID deaths? 46 or 2131? Let’s say 46, because we don’t want to mislead anyone on the fine points of dying FROM or WITH COVID.”
As ever, Craig, I agree with most of what you have said.
One thing that raised my eyebrows, however was :
” It is going to end with Crimea absorbed into Russia and some kind of autonomous status inside Ukraine for the Donbass regions. That outcome could have been agreed without war, before thousands had to die and millions be impoverished. It could be agreed today.”
In a piece that, quite rightly, extols the virtue and necessaity of nuance, this strikes me as a worryingly un-nuanced statement.
I agree that the future status of Crimea and the Donbass will be on the negotiating table when the time comes. But to say that the deal you describe “could be agreed today” is, I respectfully suggest, wrong. At the moment, the Ukranians are pushing for military victory and are doing their best to prolong and deepen the support of The West who, they have reasonable reason to believe, see the defeat of Russia as in their interests. Ukrainian attitudes are informed largely by quite a fervent nationalism which can, as you rightly point out, take an extreme form. I suggest this fervent nationalism is a major reason why Zelinsky failed to honour the Minsk agreements. We also have to remember that Zelinsky was elected on a 73% landslide and, if memory serves, part of his manifesto was specifically not to implement Minsk.
So, perhaps in abstract terms the deal you outline ‘could be agreed today.’ But as I’m sure you know, that’s not how it works. Warring parties only come to the negotiating table when the prevailing circumstances permit / require. So long as Zelinsky, and his western backers, thinks there’s a chance of military victory, they won’t agree to the terms you suggest. Only after many more months or years of military stalemate, of further degredation of the Ukrainian civilian infrastructure and perhaps a diminishing will on behalf of western ‘allies’ to finance / equip the war, will Ukraine even consider losing ‘Ukranaian Soverign Territory” to the Russians.
If, as looks possible, the Russians continue to struggle militarily, and the Ukranians make military progress this spring / summer, I suspect they’ll keep going hoping / thinking that victory is nigh. In which case, there’s no way that the deal you outlined has any chance of being agreed ‘today’, or anytime soon for that matter.
Two things have to happen for peace:
One: The piano player has to ‘move on’ to his new role of Ukranian martyr and let a grown up take charge; And, Two: Boris Johnson has to agree that it is acceptable for him.
Meanwhile, the meat grinder will continue to be well fed regardless of western propaganda.
“if memory serves, part of his manifesto was specifically not to implement Minsk”
On the contrary, Zelensky was elected by 73% because he ran as the peace candidate saying he would finally implement Minsk and end the conflict in Donbass.
“If, as looks possible, the Russians continue to struggle militarily, and the Ukrainians make military progress this spring / summer,”.
Not a good view of the politico-military situation. It’s evident to my mind that Russia is following its strategy in Syria, and waiting until victory is certain at little cost, while avoiding provoking the US into WW3. US bots always want Russia to attack straight away.
The big upcoming question is whether Ukraine is going to run out of men. It must be the case, looking at the heavy artillery casualties, the videos of the forcible impressment of Ukrainians in the street, etc. They don’t have the human resources of Russia. The urgence of this question seems to me the explanation of why Zelensky is pushing so hard for weapons, though in my opinion tanks can’t replace men.
“The big upcoming question is whether Ukraine is going to run out of men.”
or run out of ammo. The numbers in the figures for ammunition supplied by the West may look large, but when you compare them to the daily usage and the length it takes to get that ammunition from the US to Ukraine, then there does seem a good chance of a disaster in this respect.
Sorry Steve, you got it wrong. Zelensky never said that he will not honour the Minsk agreement. What he promised was to stop the war on Donbass which started in 2014, if you not aware. And once in the office he did very opposite, he intensified it.
I suggest the blog site “https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/” to balance out the propaganda from the western media.
It’s never been this bad, in terms of lack of debate/ discussion: political & media. Every party at Westminster favours escalation over diplomacy, and every major newspaper.
There was a ‘1984’ Apple TV ad urging people to ‘think different’. A Big Brother figure booming from a screen:
‘Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory thoughts. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death, and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!’
Who’d have thought that in 2023, the west would have so-called ‘disinformation-experts’, armed with their media studies degrees, policing dissent in an attempt to create this ‘1984’ level of societal control for elites they don’t even know. Many western leaders incl. EU could probably relate to that speech from the ad, agreeing with every word.
The intel agencies, elites or whomever(?) must be congratulating themselves at achieving this zero debate in the west and total information control, certainly as far as the mainstream media and newspapers go. But despite this propaganda, polls were recently showing around 60% of Germans favoured diplomacy, a negotiated solution involving land concessions with a peace treaty and security guarantees for Ukraine, over the sending of German tanks. I read through Die Welt’s btl comments and many thought this was/is a truly reckless escalation.
There are some politicians calling for fighter jets too, to provide air cover for said tanks, but to be effective, that would involve attacking air defence systems inside Russia. A tipping point escalation, surely? They have sent Leopard tanks, Challenger 2s ,M1 Abrams.. these are complex military kit to operate. Who exactly is crewing them? To be effective it’d need to be experienced Nato troops in Ukrainian uniforms; Poles, Germans and British. There is simply no way you can expedite training and send amateurs into battle with multi-million £$€ tanks.
It’ll be left for future generations to unravel what really happened in these times and apportion blame. Because this highly controlled media sure as hell aren’t going to allow that debate to happen. We’ve got blundering politicians like Ben Wallace and Liz Truss, both of whom think Ukraine can evict Russia from Crimea through firepower and force of arms. You don’t have to be a diplomatic insider to know that attempts to retake Crimea could easily trigger a tactical nuclear response, with some poor Ukrainian city on the receiving end, so why even encourage it?
How long do you think before other competitive forces and sources in the East have models to reverse engineer/dismantle and carbon copy and treasure as war bounty?
They cannot permit free speech on the war in Ukraine because the truth would collapse public support for Nato and the USA. The most extreme example is Germany where there remains total silence about the US blowing up Nord Stream and destroying Germany’s economy & standard of living. Instead Scholz merely tells Germans to take fewer hot showers.
Jeffrey Sachs expresses his disbelief at the German situation and much else in this excellent interview.
Jeffrey Sachs: The war in Ukraine: the missing context & perspective
https://youtu.be/C1EwmYbK7QA
As a Chinese lady so concisely presented things in a Twitter post…
Western accusatory playbook….
Our propaganda is a free press, yours is disinformation.
Our censorship is to ensure information ‘integrity,’ yours is an attack on freedom of expression.
Our war is a humanitarian intervention, yours is an invasion.
Our loan is aid, yours is a debt trap.
With the greatest respect I have followed the American rape of Russia, its assets and intellectual property since perestroika!
The opportunities Russia offered in peace and harmony between world nations.
To be taken advantage of, to be marginalised, to even starve Russians throughout the 1990s.
The west is untrustworthy, in every aspect of everyday dealings, with Russia and its people.
IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, Mr Putin.
Bad, giving his nation security! Allowing his nation to be fed? Unlike the nations of these islands where in its austerity, the young and old starve and the old and young this year, will freeze to death!
The suicide rates going through the roof, aye, your caring sharing NHS killing the nations infirm….. With respect Craig, take from your eyes the rose tinted glasses.
Best regards, always,
Aye
No one wins in war, as the saying goes. The West turned a blind eye to the Ukrainian neo-nazi brigades attacking the Donbas especially civilian areas and it does look like Ukraine has a problem with lauding nazi sympathisers.
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/29/on-the-influence-of-neo-nazism-in-ukraine/
Does this give Russia the right to intervene in Ukraine, some will say yes others no, the same should apply to the 2014 coup by the US in Ukraine. It has to be said that the West, especially the head of Nato – the US – wants to break Russia; is this their opportunity using compliant European nations such as Germany, or are we looking at a split world economic wise, a decreasing in living standards in the West and an increase in the East? Only time will tell.
As for Covid, Jefferey Sachs hinted that the virus could’ve been created in a lab, but there is no appetite to look further into this, and it doesn’t take a genius to know why that is. As for the Spanish flu was the first case of this deadly flu at a Kansas Military base (Camp Funston). I will be branded a conspiracy theorist, and that’s fine by me, but I believe that deadly and not so deadly viruses are manufactured in secret labs across the globe, and let’s just say that big pharma has made an absolute fortune from Covid. I fully expect something similar to Covid coming onto the scene in the not to distant future and more will follow.
Ironically the MIC are making mega profits from the conflict in Ukraine, and for the same reasons I expect that conflict to continue in one form or another.
Let’s just get one thing straight…Covid ‘vaccines’ are not vaccines, they are an experimental medical procedure. There are increasing numbers of people who have been harmed or who have died as a result of this medical procedure. The fact that this is not in the MSM is very telling but it is there and it is extremely concerning. The mantra is that they’ve saved lives and they’re safe and effective – even Gates very recently admitted that the ‘vaccines’ were a failure – and they’re anything but. It’s commonly accepted now that they do not stop you getting Covid or in transmitting it – not a vaccine therefore. If you dig deeper on this, you’ll find rafts of information showing the true nature of these jabs – and it’s nothing to do with conspiracy or theory, it’s there in plain sight. A human travesty.
Even purely from a precautionary principle perspective, History has taught us to develop that principle because launching drugs on the mass market with Bad Science is a dangerous approach to human life…
I think the truth is more nuanced (as it often is).
The Covid vaccines did save lives among people aged over 70. I live in an EU country, which started vaccinations later than the UK, and there were horrific scenes on TV news of queues of ambulances outside hospitals. Old people with Covid were dying in hospital corridors because the intensive-care wards were full. Then they were dying in ambulances in the queue because the hospital corridors were full. If you called an ambulance (for any emergency) you couldn’t get one because they were all in the queues outside the hospitals. There was almost complete breakdown of health services.
For younger people, the risk of serious illness or death was much lower. For people under 30, the risk of dying from Covid was similar to the risk of dying from flu. There should have been much more careful evaluation of the risk/benefit balance for young people, and there was not.
I think you do a good job of characterizing the official (extreme) positions regarding those topics, but not the positions of most people who oppose those official positions. Just because one or two people express extreme positions in your blog’s comments section, that does not mean that those positions are representative of the positions espoused by those who are against the official extreme ones. So, for example, I don’t know anybody among those who do not follow the official line on Ukraine that thinks that Putin is “a defender of democracy or of workers’ rights”. I also don’t know anybody who is against self-ID and for doing away with sex and replacing it with stereotypical gender roles who believes that “everybody should be forced to live a gender role determined by their physical characteristics”. Those are straw men. I’m sure that there are some very vocal people on the extremes, but I doubt they are very representative. That’s what I think. I hope this time my comment will not be deleted by the thought police. 🙂
—
[ Mod: We have no record of any comment of yours having been deleted – unless you’ve changed identity – so your “thought police” jibe is misplaced. ]
One of the reasons for lack of nuance in contemporary discourse is the sheer volume of propaganda we (in the UK at least) we are deluged with. It was true of ‘covid’ and it’s the same regarding the ‘unprovoked’ invasion of Ukraine.
The Ukraine flag is everywhere. The idiot Speaker at the House of Commons has it pinned on his blazer. Buses have it on them. At the NHS Blood & Transplant Centre where I work (it’s shite), a ‘charity board’ has been put up in the reception area with Ukraine flags all over it.
It’s not like the pro-Nato side has won the debate, there just isn’t any debate to be heard anywhere in the mainstream ‘official’ papers, TV, radio or internet. When the Online Safety Bill gets passed, soon these will be the only sources immune from prosecution, i.e. able to say whatever they like (which will of course be the Establishment’s version of the truth).
So many deaths could have been prevented by negotiating a compromise. Why are all the spineless MPs not calling for talks to stop the carnage? More death could yet be prevented, but no – after the tanks they’ll be wanting planes next, another step to all-out Nato-Russia WW3. WTF?
One thing I must pick you up on. Deaths from COVID were recorded in two separate ways and the figures were put on the government site. You are correct about the Daily figures. These were the deaths of people who had died within 28 days of a positive test. However, there was another figure (updated weekly if I recall correctly) that recorded all deaths from COVID regardless of how long it was after the positive test. NB many died some weeks later especially those on ventilators who had, at the time, a 50/50 chance of survival when they went on it.
The press decided to go with something they could update daily (more dramatic) rather than the weekly but far more accurate figure. But, as it turned out the more accurate weekly figure ended up being higher. As far as I know there MAY be some left on the government site for England only for you to confirm this.
Bottom line, it’s worse than it looks, not better – sadly..
“Just like all pandemics before it, the covid-19 virus is busily following its own self-interest by mutating into a less vicious form that can co-exist more comfortably with its host.”
Are you certain that it wouldn’t go/isn’t already going the other way (e.g. in China)?
RE Isla Bryson/Adam Graham, it seems like this current debate is just a big diversion from the lack of resources available in the justice system (as with just about any other system on which the national interest relies), by which I mean: if I’ve understood correctly, there have already been trans women present – but segregated – in women’s prisons in the UK for decades. So, in theory (and apparently in long practice), there should be no issue with keeping this person in a women’s prison if they are segregated from the other inmates.
The current debate is centred around protecting other potential victims from the actions of a serial rapist but experiences of CIS female former inmates would indicate that whilst segregated from trans women prisoners, the other prisoners weren’t segregated from serial murderers, mothers who’d raped their infant sons etc.
Clearly, if we apply the same logic, such prisoners should be segregated for the safety of all inmates but presumably the reason they aren’t is because the staffing and funding resources simply aren’t there.
Which leads to the point that the prison service is, at least in theory, supposed to be the most competent to make the assessment on an individual basis of where they can incarcerate people according to their assessment of the individual and their resources available.
Furthermore, if the person transitioning is doing so chemically/medicinally, it would seem that after 3 – 4 months they become chemically castrated with no erectile function, libido, or same way of thinking, so maybe some of the concerns about them “cynically gaming the system” aren’t as valid as could appear at first glance.
In other words, it is possible that reactionary responses fail to consider the various different factors and that a deliberate outrage is manufactured over such reactions by politicians and media moguls to detract attention from the fundamental underlying issues of finance and class war.
The Conway Hall decision is disgraceful though the fault is not with the management but lies with the sources of the pressures under which it was forced to revoke the booking. In general I think the prevailing attitude of “intolerance” is far deeper than is reflected in this article and is taking society politically and socially way back to pre-enlightenment times. We are effectively back in the “Dark Ages”.
Alexander Dugin, in his polemic “The Great Awakening v the Great Reset” (Arktos Media 2021) – implicitly following the idea associated with Thatcher that there is no such thing as society, only individuals – suggests that western style liberalism, which values individual rights over everything else, is resulting not only in the atomisation of society but also of the individual to decide which bits of his / her biological, cultural, social and economic heritage they want to retain or change, which they then seek to protect, as an animal protects their territory, under the mantle of their human rights (and by implication adopting mafia style tactics, seeking the protection of the law and other devices to maintain their “rightful” position).
So, as the argument goes, the seeds of intolerance are sown by the inherent contradictions of the collective West’s neo-liberalism that ignores all forms of collective identity (which is the basis of Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine). In Ukraine it can ignore the fact that the people from the Donbass are or were just as much Ukrainian as the citizens of Lvov or Kiev.
With Covid-19, states have adopted a different kind of intolerance, based on the idea that “we know best”, which has been true up to a point, but has failed to take into account the uncertainties, as expressed, involved.
“Tolerance” of trans-gender seems to me not to be the same as “promotion of transgender rights” and intolerance of anyone who opposes transgender rights. Rape of course is rape however committed, but I would have thought that the gender in which a person rapes another and the act itself should be the determining factor in the choice of the gender of the prison.
I wish people would stop equating covid with the flu. In its initial iteration it presented as a pulmonary disease, because in severe cases x-rays of the lungs were opaque, and patients died of lack of oxygen. But that is not the sum of covid.
Epidemiologists world-wide have been preparing for a pandemic of something like Ebola, for over a century. Ebola is highly infectious, with a case fatality rate of 40-90%.
When covid arose, it was a novel disease. The mortality rate was initially 5% in the US. But at that time, most significantly, there was no treatment.
We have known how to treat flu for hundreds of years. Since antibiotics, deaths from the flu have decreased enormously, because secondary opportunistic bacterial infections, causing pneumonia, can be shut down.
We had no treatment for covid, to turn back that deadly filling of the lungs, for months. They put people on ventilators to breathe for them, and hoped that would give their bodies time to overcome the disease.
Thus, the long-honed plans for mitigating a pandemic went into effect. Like the beginning of WWI being determined by railway timetables, and who could get the most soldiers to the front lines first. Plans create policy.
And as it turned out, covid is not a pulmonary disease. It is a vascular disease. It gets into the blood, it flows to every organ in the body, and does damage. Because you breathe it in, the lungs were first. But covid has caused kidney disease, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, brain damage, liver disease; there’s even covid toe. Covid is a vascular disease, whose effects on every organ in the body is yet unknown.
Covid has become more infectious, but less deadly, and now presents a mortality rate (in the U.S.) of 1.09% of cases. The long-term effects of covid are still unknown.
It would have been irresponsible for epidemiologists to have let covid run its course at the outset. Second-guessing what they should have done, now that we know how the disease progressed, is easy.
I do object to your intimation that the old are expendable. You are not expendable, Craig. Saving everyone possible is morally — and epidemiologically — correct.
Mainly nonsense
CWolf’s comment was actually mainly bang on, Shugs.
Word. Though we shouldn’t lazily assume that Covid-19 won’t mutate to become significantly more damaging…
For that matter, we shouldn’t lazily assume that the common cold, another coronavirus, won’t mutate to become significantly more damaging, but in the hundreds of years we have lived with it, it hasn’t. It is not in the virus’s interest to kill its host, in fact the milder the symptoms, the better for the virus, which is presumably why virulent strains are short-lived.
And to think up to ~2010 the UK’s pandemic preparedness used to be considered the “Gold standard”, on which many other countries (e.g. Singapore) based theirs. Thrown away (literally in the case of privatised “maintenance” of PPI stocks) because of diverting resources to prepare for the Brexshit catastrofuck instead.
Never let Hancock fool you into believing that no one could have expected Covid-19; as Health Minister he oversaw and then tried to hide from public domain the existence of Exercise Alice (a 2016 pandemic preparedness exercise specifically for the event of a coronavirus outbreak)…
It wasn’t novel, many people exhibited natural immunity.
Covid was circulating in europe and the USA for many months, at least, before the USA declared that China was the cause of the covid pandemic. If it was a lab leak then it almost certainly wasn’t a Chinese lab although the potential scientists involved worked with Wuhan !
Covid is the family name, of which flu is a sibling. Covid may or may not be worse than previous strains of flu, regardless a flu pandemic would have had little traction but rebranding to covid was great PR..
A small minority of people have a bad allergic reaction to the spike protein generated by covid, but most just have mild flu symptoms, so covid can be fatal for some, but so can flu !
Injecting people with a poisonous spike protein with no idea of the impact is criminally negligent at best, which is why big pharma is protected from criminal prosecution.
Effective treatment for covid has existed from day one, but it was outlawed. Treatment means no need for a gene jab so outlaw the treatment to promote the jab.
Covid-19 is the name for the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, Stevie. It is not a type of flu: coronaviruses are not in the same family as the influenza viruses – the only thing they have in common is that they are RNA viruses, though with opposite senses, and are transmitted via the respiratory system. There is no evidence that Covid was circulating in Europe and the US before it was detected in China.
SARS-CoV-2 almost certainly emerged (likely accidently) from a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, though that lab will have been mostly funded (to the tune of tens of millions) by the US Dept of Defense, via the ‘charity’ Ecohealth, in order to get round a federal ban on ‘gain-of-function’ methodologies being carried out in the States. The claim is that the Pentagon was interested in developing vaccines for SARS-type coronaviruses, just in case one happened to spill-over from the natural environment into humans when their ‘warfighters’ (their word) happened to be fighting in southern China or northern Vietnam/Laos, and not in developing potential bioweapons. If you believe that, I’ve got a golden bridge in San Francisco to sell you.
Pfizer & Moderna etc are protected from civil prosecution in relation to their Covid vaccines, not from criminal prosecution. Reasonably effective pharmaceutical treatments (ivermectin, calcifediol etc) have existed from day one, but the results of trials indicating such only began to be published in late summer 2020. Had they been officially deemed suitable treatments, the vaccines could not have received emergency use licences, so obviously these trials had to be discredited, with Dr Andrew Hill at Liverpool Uni playing a particularly egregious role.
Hopefully all this information will satisfy your anti-Americanism.
“There is no evidence that Covid was circulating in Europe and the US before it was detected in China.”
but plenty of evidence that other coronaviruses were. I’ve had colds that were worse than COVID. Just becasue it came from China doesn’t mean it came from a lab, although it may well have done. Bubonic plague came from that part of the world and that didn’t come from a lab.
The evidence does exist. GP records and analysis of sewage has identified Covid in Europe and the US (and probably elsewhere) many months prior to announcements of a pandemic by the west. The Chinese/Wuhan announcement was purely political based on CIA sources. Although Wuhan WAS involved in ‘gain of function’ work in cooperation with the USA/DARPA/Fauci it almost certainly was not the source.
Thanks for your reply Bayard. Yes, there are several coronaviruses that infect humans in widespread circulation (e.g. NL63, HKU1, OC43). They cause common colds and have nowhere near the infection fatality rates of SARS-CoV-2, even in its milder Omicron forms. If you take a deep dive, the circumstantial evidence that the latter came from a lab, specifically one at the WIV, is compelling. The bubonic plague which led to the Black Death is generally thought to have originated from the Russian steppes.
Thanks for your reply Stevie. Out of many samples of Barcelona wastewater from 2019 tested by a group in Spain, only one (dated 12th March) gave a low reading for SARS-CoV-2. That would have almost certainly been a false positive. US and European GP records wouldn’t have included the results of PCR tests for Covid at any point in 2019. In addition, had Covid been circulating in the US & Europe before Wuhan, it would have collapsed their health services well before the Hubei province lockdown beginning 23rd Jan 2020.
All of which gives me another chance to plug Matt Ridley & Alina Chan’s book ‘Viral’ which is very good on the origins of Covid-19. Free copies are now available on Audible apparently:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Viral-Search-Covid-19-Alina-Chan/dp/0008487537
Just to point out two assumptions you make that are dubious: PCR Testing and that Covid is deadly.
GP records were based on blood tests and autopsy reports. Sewage Testing was carried out in Germany and the US as well as Spain, to my knowledge
“We had no treatment for covid, to turn back that deadly filling of the lungs, for months.”
And what treatment do we have now?
“When covid arose, it was a novel disease. The mortality rate was initially 5% in the US. But at that time, most significantly, there was no treatment.”
These statements are not correct. First, covid was not truly a novel disease. We have been exposed to other coronaviruses for centuries, and so a great many people already had partial immunity to SARS-CoV2 when it first appeared. This was shown by the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship incident, which served as a kind of laboratory experiment for covid. A majority of the people on the Diamond Princess did not even become ill, despite everyone on board being exposed to the virus–they had sufficient immunity not to catch it. Further, out of a population on board of over 3,000, only 12 people died, showing that the mortality rate from the virus was in the range of typical flu.
Second, the mortality rate from covid in the U.S. was never 5 percent. It took some time to establish what the true mortality rate was, and 1 percent or less for the entire population was eventually arrived at–again, typical of a flu pandemic. And if you exclude the elderly from the calculation, the mortality rate for the population under 70 years of age has proven to be only a small fraction of 1 percent. The age stratification of the risk is important–for children under 16, there is hardly any risk at all.
Then there is the matter of “no treatment”. It quickly became clear that there were treatments, using repurposed drugs, and if properly applied, early in the illness, they were very effective. It also became clear, if you were paying attention, that the pharma companies, in league with public health officials, went on a campaign to suppress these early treatments, as permitting their use would threaten the roll-out of the “vaccines”. So it was that we saw hydroxychlorquine associated with orange man bad Donald Trump, and ivermectin called “horse dewormer” by the CDC no less. Dr. Meryl Nass has documented this campaign to suppress early treatment of covid:
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/how-a-false-hydroxychloroquine-narrative-23d
Deary me Craig
Covid 19 is NOTHING like the flu and I have had very severe form of flu.
It has caused in many people, multiple problems to every system of the body particularly blood and central nervous system, not helped by lack of emergency or ongoing treatment for those affected .
It causes strokes , heart attacks and even both at the same time.
It damages the brain central and peripheral nervous systems and leads to, in quite a considerable number of people, multiple active aggressive auto-immune diseases.
By the third week of the virus some people, especially between the age of 30-55 experience a total over-reaction by the immune system often known as a Cytokine storm. This affects all organs and is what kills those who managed to survive the compromised breathing /viral pneumonia stage and the hypoxia. Either killing people from organ failure or sepsis or both. The heart can be affected permanently even if a scan looks normal. Making mild activity or aerobic exercise an instant risk of cardiac arrest and failure or, yet again, stroke.
In some people it has never stopped; there has been no recovery or well period, only acute and chronic perpetual crises.
It is like living with every illness known, all at once and feels like living in a terminal decline as if you are 90 years old and have terminal illness. Some children have even been affected as badly as this.
People who died in the early weeks and months of the pandemic did so because there was no help and they were prohibited from going to hospital. Those that eventually went to hospital were sent home; those that needed oxygen were not given it even if they showed symptoms of hypoxia, brain damage, stroke or bleed on brain or myopathies and pericarditis.
None of the people in the early months of the pandemic who were prevented from a test, or prevented from getting hospital treatment in a non-intensive setting such as supplementary oxygen. Who had severe lasting symptoms…i.e. life threatening 24 hours a day for months and with subsequent crises returning lasting more months with no recovery in between only chromic and ongoing attacks to nerves that control, breathing, swallowing, movement, or brain function deficits such as co-ordination, balance spatial awareness, orientation executive function, hand extension problems, reach, grip. Standing, sitting walking. Reading and writing and even speaking!! NONE were ever included in any studies or cohorts of patients.
This has skewed the statistics of the severity. Lead to Gaslighting of patients (even when those patients were doctors) both in A&E and at GP level and has dishonestly persuaded the general public in the UK that the virus was not dangerous or the figment of some people’s imagination.
You really are talking total tripe on this subject, Craig.
Really, you just add to the insult and injury people who are still ill experience, so ill that you can’t communicate for a year and when you do nobody believes you because it was public policy to abandon patients.
There is ample evidence that it was a chimera developed by gain of function under the direction of Anthony Fauci and most of that research though entirely prohibited under the international moratorium on biological weapons development signed by the USA – also violated newer legislation in America. The work was carried out in a University Laboratory Category 4 in North Carolina initially to hide the real aim of the research and when it looked like those involved were being rumbled there was a sudden known flight of some of the Chinese scientists involved back to Wuhan; emails to prove these events have been found now, and one developer of the so-called vaccines was in step with the Gain of Function research effectively developing the Moderna jag at the same time; that company was only set up in 2015 for such a purpose.
Whether it was to be used on a target population for warfare or economic terrorism is yet to be confirmed as it seems the safety protocols in the Wuhan lab were poor and voilà a global pandemic whether or not the planners and developers of this eugenic even were ready with their planned event or not.
How dare you say it’s nothing! Be glad you didn’t suffocate to death in a care home or indeed in Saughton.
It’s bad enough the then Government in London deliberately let people die of any age, or be permanently incapacitated and fighting ongoing battles with attacks on the umpteen systems of the body. By telling Health Board Chief not to treat and not to test.
Covid would have been relatively insignificant, what promoted it from minor to major was entirely down to the political machinations that managed to turn a manageable problem into a major, chaotic fiasco that killed tens of thousands needlessly and cost billions. Why this happened is still not entirely clear. But, as soon as the corrupt realised that covid could be used to increase power and money the path was set. Team covid was responsible for the mass deaths and includes the medical profession, government, big pharma and the MSM.
Yes the COVID virus was dangerous to some people. This is true for nearly all viruses. The point is that, to the vast majority of people, it wasn’t. No health system in the world can prevent everyone from dying from anything except old age. In any case, Craig wasn’t saying COVID was the flu, he wasn’t even saying that it was like the flu, he was saying it had similar mortality statistics as the flu.
Before the Russians crossed the border, the US and UK talked up a staged incident the Russians had already filmed, featuring dead and injured Russian soldiers – an incident that was to be blamed on a Ukrainian attack and creating a pretext for said invasion. Said footage never materialised obviously, which suggests western intel were just covering the bases, fearing that eventuality, because that’s precisely how they would have approached justifying a western incursion; by creating a casus belli, one that would have been faithfully relayed and amplified by western MSM, no questions or doubts raised, and with trolls attacking anyone raising suspicions about the timing.
We saw this taking shape with Iran when mysterious incidents happened, out of the blue; tanker attacks in the Persian Gulf, one bizarrely, on a tanker shipping Iranian oil; missile or drone attacks on KSA. All supposedly creating a casus belli for bombing Iran, as if Iran were deliberately sabotaging itself at the worst moment possible with nuclear talks deadlocked. In Syria, Assad supposedly launched a chemical weapons attack, in Damascus of all places, to no military advantage; just as the long traveled (months at sea) Western warships pull into formation off the coast, and just as the weapons inspectors arrive. Even Lord West, fmr Chief of the Naval Staff stated, from Assad’s perspective it makes no sense whatsoever, on the TV News. The West has ultra ruthless intel agencies, that seemingly operate with total impunity, laying the framework for public support back home, and the media lap this shit up without question.
As for the ‘No2’ event/debate.
Rather than cancelling through intimidatory tactics akin to those expected under some deeply repressive regime, why don’t they come to the debate and make their case, politely? They simply can’t claim they despise Putin’s authoritarianism, while displaying the same bullying tendency with critics here. If further empowered they’d clearly be a mirror image of the likes of Lukashenko and Putin.
They say they won’t allow fascism a voice, which at first reading sounds plausible, but by any measure, not a single person who could be accurately described as a fascist is down to attend. It’s not like Nick Griffin is invited, like he was by the BBC’s Question Time. Some of the names may have a deeply jaundiced view of the US/UK Government’s motives and the unelected EU cabal’s behaviour, but often there’s a sound reason behind that. One that isn’t necessarily known to these propagandists. Maybe some inside knowledge, that if they knew it might change their whole ‘West = good guys’ perspective too.
We seem to be an time where anyone with an opposing view is automatically a ‘fascist’, which is just lazy excuse for cancelling from those who are incapable of debating a topic without resorting to abuse.
I like your view point and see much the same way. I disagree with several point on covid19.
On vaccines, read “Turtles All The Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth”. I don’t think there is any refutation of the contents.
On the mRNA/DNA vaccines effectiveness and safety, check Prof Norman Fenton’s work, and the repression an expert academic like him has experienced (as you are experiencing). https://wherearethenumbers.substack.com/p/the-lancet-has-become-a-laughing – is a good starting point.
On the source of sars-cov-2 there are too many odd features in the structure of the ‘spike protein’ (actually a cluster of many proteins) like the 19-nucleotide sequence on which Moderna has a patent from 2015 (probablilty 10^-12). FOIA emails released that show early on that Anthony Fauci, Jeremy Farrar and Christian Drosten were desperate to shut down any discussion of possible experimental origin. By odd coincidence there is a German – Chinese virus research lab in which Drosten has an interest adjacent to the Wuhan market. Fauci was funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan. And lots more. Too much circumstantial evidence.
Worth a quick read of the US HHS report on Fauci’s NIH.
https://oig.hhs.gov/oas/reports/region5/52100025.asp
“Using its discretion, NIH did not refer the research to HHS for an outside review for enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (ePPPs) because it determined the research did not involve and was not reasonably anticipated to create, use, or transfer an ePPP. However, NIH added a special term and condition in EcoHealth’s awards and provided limited guidance on how EcoHealth should comply with that requirement”. — ePPP a euphemism for gain-of-function research.
“Some of these deficiencies include: NIH’s improper termination of a grant; EcoHealth’s inability to obtain scientific documentation from WIV; and EcoHealth’s improper use of grant funds, resulting in $89,171 in unallowable costs”. —- WIV – spell it out, the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Something wrong was going on.
I’m all for people making up their own minds, but that ability depends on the free exchange of information. When all opinions that do not agree with the government’s position are banned, when we’re not permitted to know what the Russians are saying or doing, when official “information” is dribbled out by anonymous “officials” who provide no actual evidence for anything, when the “security” services police every facet of daily life, when the media are pure monopolies–how is this supposed to work?
Today’s conjecture – wrongly labelled ‘disinformation’ is too often tomorrow’s factual information.
I’ve never taken a strong view on Covid-19; its origins or vaccine safety. I’ve been vaccinated (3 jabs), but it was purely on trust and the assumption that if proves to be harmful in the longer term, there will be an awful lot of public anger. The people who are most self-righteous in denouncing vaccine hesitancy in others, are just annoying. This snippet from Cory Doctorow’s excellent blog illustrates why they should be cautious:
” Unless you have a PhD in virology, cell biology and epidemiology, you can’t verify the claims of vaccine safety. Even if you have those qualifications, you’re trusting that the study data in journals isn’t forged.
I trust vaccines – I’ve been jabbed five times now – but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to doubt either Big Pharma or its regulators. A decade ago, my chronic pain specialist told me I should take regular doses of powerful opioids, and pooh-poohed my safety and addiction concerns. He told me that pharma companies like Purdue and regulators like the FDA had re-evaluated the safety of opioids and now deemed them far safer.
I “did my own research” and concluded that this was wrong. I concluded that the FDA had been captured by a monopolistic and rapacious pharma sector that was complicit in waves of mass-death that produced billions in profits for the Sackler family and other opioid crime-bosses.
I was an “opioid denier.” I was right. The failure of the pharma companies to act in good faith, and the failure of the regulator to hold them to account is a disaster that has consequences beyond the mountain of overdose deaths. There’s a direct line from that failure to vaccine denial, and another to the subsequent cruel denial of pain meds to people who desperately need them.”
You’ve summed it up brilliantly, Pasha.
If our elected representatives had any interest in concepts like informed liberal democracy or Popper’s “Open Society”, your question would be asked in Parliament every day.
But they don’t; so it isn’t.
re: freedom of speech / Germany:
one dramatic example, and surely only the first of several to come, is the conviction of an activist a few days ago, for giving a speech in Berlin at the Red Army Memorial in Berlin-Treptow June 22nd of last year.
The speech in German can be read here:
https://cooptv.wordpress.com/2022/07/04/22-juni-1941-wir-vergessen-nicht-sowjetisches-ehrenmal-berlin-heiner-bucker-coop-anti-war-cafe/
The very same speech given 2021 would have been acknowledged by the usual moralistic routine, meaningless beyond the known redderick.
Now in 2022 an attorney filed a suit against the orator, a court accepted and convicted him to 2000 Euros or 40 days in confinement.
Basis was the latest expansion of article 140 of German criminal law concerned with Holocaust denialism in the first place.
Since, November I believe, however this article now also makes views subject to criminalization that are alleged denials of war crimes in general or acts considered as such! (but what entity decides on the definition of what a war crime is and what not is entirely unclear.)
The implications and the far-reaching consequences are yet to be seen.
Already past spring anti-war sit-ins had major difficulties with finding space on campuses to meet.
This might have now taken another turn for the worse with the amendment.
We are witnessing a historic breakdown of democratic rights and standards that have been achieved over the course of 30 years between the 1960s and 1990s.
And as stated by Mr. Murray correctly, social media bear an overwhelming responsibility for this catastrophic development.
Just one little reported example:
The Intercept reported that the very same “progressive” entertainment giants like FB, Google, Disney, that would harshly criticize Roe vs. Wade and make big headlines by guaranteeing their staff safe abortions, were the very same corporations that funded those very states which would pass anti-abortion laws, purely because they were pushing for business friendly taxation and subsidies. Deal-making. Knowing very well what these deals with those ultra conservative forces would do to civil rights.
The former was reported world-wide. The latter responsibility almost by noone.
This is the major issue.
Just as with the person Elon Musk.
Musk, as FAIR reported, makes billions in contracts with US military by supplying communication infrastructure via his “space facilities” to the US army branches.
He is simply making money with war just like any other arms manufacturer.
That´s how Musk keeps his company afloat.
Otherwise it would have all gone bankrupt years ago. (his current Tesla crisis is only an indicator for the artificial character of his fake businesses).
All these big and littel things are dots that ought to be connected to get a big and very scary picture.
But it is the same generation having been fed with this social media who is incapable in prescinding their social bubbles and social network, from the destructiveness that it propells.
Workers rights, labour unions, Civil rights movements – none would have taken place if people had not met and talked in person.
Had not argued in person.
Had not learned to deal with other views.
Had not learned to defend an opinion.
Had not been educated on areas beyond their professional expertise.
that is also why Covid – coincidence or not – turned out such a perfect precursor for what would become a state-of the art NATO PR-stunt which now drags us all ever closer to annihilation either by climate catatrophe or nuclear war.
That of course leaves us no other choice but press forward and get organized and thus follow, e.g. Mr. Murray´s, but not only his, of course, example.
Although the extremes of wealth in Russia are as large as anywhere, and the oligarchs just as corrupt, surely Mr. Putin must be accepted as rescuing the economy from the pseudo capitalist chaos of the previous regimes. The question I would ask is: If there had been no anti-Russian unrest in Donbass, no American intervention in elections and conniving with the violent coup in Ukraine (face it – the rest of the west just tagged meekly along), no expansion of NATO proposed, and no (likely nuclear tipped) missile bases placed on Russia’s borders, and without decades of anti-Russian propaganda and illegitimate sanctions, would not Mr. Putin have simply carried on selling us Oil and Gas, and buying western made goods and services? We may not like how Russia responded, but the provocation was overwhelming.
The State Department and CIA certainly have the ambition, means and resources to manipulate and control whole continents.
The geostrategic goal here is to isolate Russia from China, keep the EU in its box (dependent on the US for its defence through NATO, and its energy needs using costly US LNG) and the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Ethical considerations aside, looking at results thus far, they seem to be winning. Trump created a pause, as all that was put on hold. But as soon as Biden won, all the old crew came back and resumed where they left off.
Putin was a hubris driven fool walking into this obvious trap. Looking at this objectively, I don’t know how Russia escapes this mess now. Russia entered expecting Ukraine to offer little resistance and capitulate without a fight, now they can neither conquer all Ukraine (west) nor destroy it. If the aim is the narrower objective of holding on to captured territory in the East, then that’s possible. But with Western-backed Zelensky in power, Kyiv will never accept that. They could try to take Kyiv, but it will be a brutal, costly fight, that makes everything thus far look like a skirmish.
“Putin was a hubris driven fool walking into this obvious trap”
I don´t kow if this is true.
I don´t know who can answer this for sure.
But one question:
If the US is as powerful as you suggest – (CIA controlling continents)
– and if this US has set its mind onto integrating Ukraine into NATO, and onto building up its conventional military into a super fortress aka “second Israel” (to quote Zelenski), and eventually onto placing nuclear devices on that very territory, after Ukraine´s status has become Article 5 worthy –
who could have ever stopped the US from doing so?
The Europeans?
They weren´t even capable of protecting their core interest in form of Nordstream a few miles off Hamburg! And are not even capable of admitting who the true perpetrator was.
The Chinese? In Ukraine?
Who?
Hans von Sponeck Jr., a German diplomat and one of the oldest serving members of the U.N. 1968-2000, now an antiwar activist, argued last December that the UN and almost all international legislative intitutions, IMF, World Bank, OSCE, and so forth, are still – for historic reasons obviously – Western dominated institutions that still have one master only they will follow.
Attempts to deviate from this pattern will be answered with harshest possible reactions by the US.
So, in reality, the Russian options may have been very limited.
We don´t know for sure.
(of course I personally still hope that there would have been a non-violent way by complex diplomacy not sought out).
But reality is harsh. As is the decade long contempt towards Russia in certain parts of Western elites and its culture.
AG
I think the US people will eventually elect someone to the Presidency of good character like a JFK or a Bernie Sanders. Someone who’ll look at this hegemonic scheming, that cares not for others’ democracy or rights, and object on moral grounds, demanding a more ethical foreign policy.
Most of the old guard Cold War warriors in both major US parties will be gone in 10 years, and unless the CIA and State Dept can install another Clinton or Obama type stooge, or a compliant oldie like Biden. Then where is the next generation of popular leadership coming from?
America may even move to a proportional, multi-party system (best case scenario) as political discontent grows with the sham two-party system. Which would achieve the same result. I hope the UK, the US’s partner in crime, dumps our two-party system too for the same reason. The locked down two-party systems are responsible for the lack of accountability. If both parties agree on the broad foreign policy aims, how can anything be changed via election?
” now they can neither conquer all Ukraine (west) nor destroy it.”
Says someone. The war isn’t over yet and Russia looks to have more of everything required.
“I think the US people will eventually elect someone to the Presidency of good character like a JFK or a Bernie Sanders. ”
Such persons are not allowed to stand for election.
“Putin was a hubris driven fool walking into this obvious trap. ”
Was he? Was it even a trap? It must have been obvious to anyone who was reasonably well informed and intelligent that war was inevitable, it was just a case of when, just like at the beginning of the C20th. There were obvious advantages in striking first, and it must have also been obvious that the economic war was as inevitable as the physical war.
In any case, war is popular, even amongst those who are going to be fighting and have a good chance of ending up dead or maimed, viz the enthusiasm to join up at the start of WWI. So long as there isn’t gross incompetence amongst the commanders and strategists and so long as your side can be seen to be winning and teaching the subhumans on the other side a lesson they won’t forget in a hurry, then war remains popular. No political party in the C20th or 21st has been able to survive a house price crash and be re-elected, without they won a war in the meantime.
even if I am not being addressed (it´s just too important to me. So in case simply ignore me):
US historian Nicolai Petro, by no means a radical activist, in his latest book “TRAGEDY OF UKRAINE” at least argues that the core of the matter is Ukrainian nationalism, and unsolved ethnic domestic issues that eventually made for a far right government which would then unrelentingly go for confrontational politics towards Russia and against everything Russian.
In effect:
Considerable parts of the new far right Ukrainian political elite would definitely rule out any “co-habitation” style of politics, rule out any compromise, any peaceful resolution, and thus rule out any progressive liberal political model and law-making – federal Ukrainian state and granting liberal ethnic rights regarding language and religion and education.
As one Ukrainian politician put it bluntly: we want either war with Russia, or a permanent state of hostility towards Russia. Preferably the latter.
If Russia cannot be wiped off the face of the Earth as some more radical elements put it, then at least everything Russian inside Ukraine has to be eradicated, as suggested by less radical elements.
This is not interpretation, this is verbatim.
Just look into this terrifying conversation with former book publisher and director of the Ukrainian Literature Institute Oleksandra Koval, May 2022:
https://interfax.com.ua/news/interview/834181.html
She suggested to purge 100 mio. books in Russian language to “clean” Ukraine´s libraries.
And to avoid misundertanding:
The single digit electoral results for the Svoboda Party (which was formed out of the Fascist groups shortly before 2014 with the sole purpose to undercut the political landscape) was no obstacle for real influence.
As with para-military is often the case, they took over positions in police administration and military and the security sector of the country, also as members of other parties.
This is one of the reasons Nicolai Petro himself admitted that he, as most decent observers back then between 2008-2014, underestimated the Far Right´s influence.
Had it not been for these people, and had it not been for lack of will to cooperate (approaches were there, but all disbanded by Zelenski´s band of merry men), we could have gotten along well with Russia.
And with some smart people in Bruxelles a path to the Gorbachev “Common House of Europe” would have become a real option.
But that was a red line for Washington.
And to realize this lost historical chance makes me really sad sometimes.
Zelensky clearly isn’t free to decide all that much. He’s the face of Ukraine’s struggle, but the big powerful players will decide his fate.
Before he became President, he became famous with a TV show and comedy routines, which involved mocking most of that which the country now denies it’s got a problem with; namely, corruption, the far right and increasing subservience and indebtedness to the US.
The EU has played a dreadful role too. From initially taking sides simply because western Ukraine (incl.Kyiv) were historically more pro-EU. After the 2013-14 Maidan coup, polls were showing just under 50% support for the protesters actions nationwide. Imagine a democratically elected western European govt being overthrown by a mob, that had less than half that country’s population in support. It’d rightly be seen as a democratic outrage, with the EU and US leading the condemnation.
AG
Victoria Nuland commenting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline bombing:
“Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.”
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1618763049007198208
And some still think Russia did this to its own €15bn pipeline.
…The same Victoria Nuland who, back in 2014, as assistant US secretary of state, was recorded saying, ‘Fuck the EU’ in a conversion about Ukraine post-coup govt formation.
European leaders are just pawns to these people.
As the saying goes: ‘If you haven’t got a plan, then you’ll end up as part of someone else’s plan.’ Europe has ended up as part of the US’s plan, completely subservient and with the fate of this war decided in Washington.
no wonder these people applauded Zelenski´s awful Churchill impersonation.
They themselves have no artistic taste, no qualms, no decency.
In German we call that “Schmierentheater”.
Something like “farce” or “horseplay” but much more malicious.
ah, since I am not part of Twitter world – thank you!
Thank you for this.
“The Honorable Victoria Nuland”
Surely some mistake?
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/26/robert-parry-the-mess-that-nuland-made/
With you on much of this Craig – but Covid is in no way comparable to Flu – I had it 2 years ago and I still cannot breathe properly, and the same goes for my Brother in Law. Although the flu, like any virus, can cause some damage to tissues in the body, the extent to which Covid destroys cells is far greater. Some people never regained their sense of smell, and we do not yet know what other long term effects may be.
Permanent loss of sense of smell and taste is evidence of brain damage.
Covid is a disease of the vascular system not the respiratory system and there is a growing body of evidence that it also ages the immune system, with so far unknown future consequences, but there is the possibility that the pattern of an acute illness followed by eventual immune system deficiency leading to an increase in opportunistic infections mirrors the HIV>AIDS progression.
Craig’s Covid minimising is reckless; avoiding repeated infection if at all possible would be strongly advised.
. “but Covid is in no way comparable to Flu”
It is, in the way that Craig is comparing it, its mortality statistics. In that way it is comparable to every other potentially fatal disease.
I disagree, Covid IS compable to flu. The problem, I believe, is that a lot of people haven’t actually ever had proper flu. Proper flu will put you in bed in a real bad state for more than a week and recovery can take a month or more – and that is if you are young and fit – my experience years ago. If you aren’t young and fit it will probably kill you. Prior to covid the UK was averaging 18-30k deaths a year from flu. Spanish flu (actually american) was much worse.
If you had a bad reaction to covid this is potentially because you are allergic to the spike protein that it generates. So my question would be after you caught covid were you jabbed ? If so your problems might be the treatment not the disease. The truth is not necessarily what we are told by those in charge !
On the trans issue you speak with compassion, which tells me that you might be a wee bitty naive about the wider consequences of pretending that a man is a woman.
We will always have folk unhappy with the hand nature dealt them and society should always offer enough room to them to act out their frustration.
Society cannot be expected to bend or twist commonly held truths to suit those few deviants looking to sabotage the age old parent child paradigm.
Gender dysphoria is real but not nearly as common as some Sturrells would have us believe.
The Rapist
Adam Graham is a vicious violent double rapist, the sort of person that makes women afraid to walk down the high street
The first rape occurred in 2016 when he was living with the victim & her mother
On prerecorded video evidence the anonymous 30 year old victim
“said she was raped for half-an-hour.
“All I said was ‘no’ over and over and over again,” she said.
“At the time I was so scared. Sick to the stomach. I just didn’t know what was going on.” —
She said Bryson later threatened her family with harm if she told anyone
Clearly she couldn’t push him off, yell out or tell her mom or anyone & this left the vicious rapist roaming the streets for 6 years
Such is life
Inevitably in 2019 the rapist struck again
The second anonymous victim told the court Bryson continued to have sex with her after she said stop
“In evidence via live video-link, the 34-year-old said
in June 2019, they were at her home in Drumchapel watching soaps.
The victim said her pyjama bottoms were removed by Bryson, who performed a sex act which she consented to, but then she asked Bryson to stop”
“The court heard Bryson entered the victim with “her penis”, and was told to stop because Bryson was “crushing” the victim”
Bryson offered a pathetic excuse claiming both women consented to having sex
Judge Lord Scott proclaimed that the crimes were “considerable” and that “a significant sentence is inevitable”
Bryson now has a life in Saughton prison confined to 8 X 12 cell for 22+ hours & the joy of walking ankle deep in filth for exercise as can be confirmed by another well known jail bird
Taking such a vicious violent sex offender of the streets reassures the public that all is well with Scottish Justice
Currently juries find people guilty beyond reasonable doubt when a mere majority are convinced by the prosecutor
The standard could be lowered to guilty if only one was convinced
This would ensure higher conviction rates and enhance the prestige & expansion of Scotland’s Prison Industry
?
“The standard could be lowered to guilty if only one was convinced”
…so get rid of Juries altogether then?
I wonder how the fit up of Alex Salmond would have gone if that had been the case in his show trial…
With very minor differences, I agree entirely with you Craig, on all three subjects.
So – having stated this:-
“That outcome could have been agreed without war, before thousands had to die and millions be impoverished”
Who was the prime mover to bring the war on?”
Every indication is that, geopolitically, war was inevitable.
the media and all the sensibles have simply ignored trump’s warning of nuclear escalation yesterday and his call for urgent peace talks.
as always they know what’s sensible and appropriate. we should trust their judgement.
“Putin is a very bad man, and the West is only just achieving the levels of wealth inequality that Russia has experienced (with a push from the West) these last three decades.”
I don’t suppose he is any worse than Biden, Sunak, Macron et al. The most interesting upshoot from this war is that Russia will probably regain a lot of its resource base back again.
The oligarchs only became rich by flogging Russia’s natural resources off to the West. When inevitably the West confiscates Russia’s foreign reserves, presumably Russia will just renationalize its resources in retaliation.
I can’t see a scenario that Donbas autonomy is going to be an acceptable solution to anybody now, I guess it is possible Ukraine may be able to subjugate the cities of Lugansk and Donetsk, but they will not willing submit and Russia won’t abandon them. Russia also announced building a 30 000 strong city on the east bank of the Dniepr, so it looks like it is not going to try and recover the west bank and equally it won’t give up the land corridor (or they would be building the new city in Crimea )
My guesstimate is that perhaps 60000 more Ukrainian dead and 20000 more Donbas/Russian dead and then everyone will be more or less happy to sign off on that – and along with massive profits for the armaments industries and their shareholders.
A comparable scenario would be suppose 70% of Northern Ireland wished to reunite with Ireland – would a massive war really be desirable to compel them to stay in the United Kingdom?
“Putin is a very bad man, and the West is only just achieving the levels of wealth inequality that Russia has experienced (with a push from the West) these last three decades.”
I don’t suppose he is any worse than Biden, Sunak, Macron et al
Indeed that is my point. The leadership on both sides is rotten. It is the dafties who believe one side wear white hats that I am addressing.