Sander van der Linden’s webpage at Cambridge University says he is an esteemed academic with prior positions at Princeton and Yale, and has published studies on social influence misinformation and fake news that place him among the top 1% of all social researchers and the top 2% across all of science.
Pretty much every major media outlet—the New York Times, BBC, CNN, the Economist, NPR, the Washington Post and NBC Nightly News — has interviewed van der Linden about his research, while his book Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity received wide praise.
But a month back, he climbed down from his lofty academic perch and picked a fight on X with writer Nate Silver and… Professor van der Linden got crushed: exposed as a liar and a quack who spreads misinformation while editing his personal Wikipedia page for the last decade through various single purpose accounts (SPAs) or sock puppets, to burnish his credentials and promote himself and his research.
“We are still getting numerous SPAs on this topic,” one Wikipedia editor noted about Sander van der Linden’s biography. “Nothing has changed, except they’ve gotten better at not getting caught.”
Examined in detail, the van der Linden episode highlights growing evidence that ‘“’misinformation research’ is just politics dressed up in academic garb to suppress and censor dissent on controversial topics.
The kerfuffle kicked off a few weeks back when Sander van der Linden whipped up a brawl on X with Nate Silver, perhaps because Silver has 3.3 million followers and van der Linden has around 15,000 and was hoping to attract some attention to himself. Days after the spat began, van der Linden was exposed for having edited Wikipedia pages to promote himself and his research. But more on that later.
In the first round, van der Linden promoted an article from years back, calling the possibility of a lab accident a racist conspiracy theory. Virologists and disinformation ‘experts’ promoted this line for years, until too much evidence squirted out showing that it never made sense. Plus, why is it “racist” to say the pandemic started in a Chinese lab and not in a Chinese market that sells wild animals?
It’s a narrative that never made any sense and was obviously designed to shut down discussion by labeling people “racist”.
“Misinformation has become a completely incoherent concept,” Silver wrote. “A game of ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue’.”
Oh, but it goes on.
Van der Linden then argued there was a “consensus” that the pandemic started naturally, as opposed to a “conspiracy” that it began in a lab. Again, this highlights how much of disinformation ‘research’ is slapping labels on ideas for reasons that are never really explained. It’s rhetorical magic.
And van der Linden ignores bounties of evidence that virologists ran a propaganda campaign to shout down anyone asking questions about a lab accident by planting papers in the Lancet Emerging Microbes and Infections and Nature Medicine.
“The ‘broad’ definition of misinformation is incoherent,” Silver noted. “What it signifies now is an effort to suppress dissent and launder partisan opinions into a false consensus on matters of legitimate controversy. It’s a cynical enterprise, aimed at the gullible.”
Van der Linden then doubled down with the “this is all a racism” argument.
“Half the reason Team Misinformation people bug me,” Silver responded, “Is because it’s just so obvious what they’re doing, taking genuinely contentious discussions and stigmatising the positions that don’t match their politics with the thinnest imaginable reeds of expert authority.”
Oh, but it continued – for several days. (This guy needs attention, no?)
Van der Linden then put out a tweet to drag others into the fight, including Peter Hotez, who was caught funding gain-of-function studies in Wuhan, researcher Angela Rasmussen and Arizona’s Michael Worobey, whose research on the pandemic’s origin has been noted for “careless and unprofessional handling of statistical methodology”.
At this point, it became pretty clear that van der Linden was trolling Silver to bring attention to himself — and he got that attention.
Digging through van der Linden’s Wikipedia page, the X account @triplebankshot noted that Wiki editors had caught van der Linden editing his page for the last decade through various sock puppets to create a suite of promotional material.
This guy is a complete fraud and pathological liar. He’s been repeatedly banned from Wikipedia over the last 10-plus years for using an army of sock puppets to create articles about himself with self-promotional material.
In the talk section of Sander van der Linden’s Wikipedia page, editors discussed how various purportedly unrelated accounts kept adding entries to promote Sander van der Linden, his research and his book. Here’s some of their findings:
- In 2019, two weeks before this paper was published, Whatdoyouknowanyway created an article about the journal it was published in.
- In July 2020 Meerkat2020 created Bad_News_(video_game) – his only contribution. That contained screenshots which have since been deleted on commons that were originally uploaded by Tony_gladstone1 who was blocked as part of the SPI.
- In September 2020 Jibberjabber20 made various unsourced changes to the biography which wouldn’t have been known publicly.
- In late 2020/early 2021, Youshallnotpass001 made two major edits to the biography which created a substantial section on his research contributions. He also argued against merging Gateway belief model (which had been redirected to the biography in 2018).
- In February this year, AntiMusk added promotional information about his newly-published Foolproof book and also removed information which would not have been known to the casual independent observer (Director of Studies in Psychological and Behavioural Sciences…)
- In May this year, Booklover 2023 created Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity with his first edit after being auto-confirmed. It contains a glowing biography of van der Linden and he also uploaded a high-resolution (1500 x 2300) version of the book cover which is not present in the source that he linked to, nor am I able to find it through reverse image searches. He was explicitly asked whether he had a conflict of interest by Jimfbleak and stated “There is no conflict of interest”. (Note that he refers to Against Empathy in that same post, which AntiMusk also edited.)
The editors concluded that these accounts were being generated just to promote Sander van der Linden, meaning van der Linden was orchestrating these accounts to craft propaganda about himself.
Some final thoughts from Silver about the whole Sander van der Linden episode and the silly academic discipline of ‘misinformation research’.
First published in Paul D. Thacker’s Disinformation Chronicle.
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So…another dodgy article…especially the headline.
Seems to be inferring a vaccine efficacy, by considering all causes of death rather than covid deaths.
I suppose it will convince the majority of your readers.
I really wish you would write some naughty words on the verboten list. Go on, please.
Well he used the word “inferring” rather than “implying”, which is kind of naughty.
I’m not sure you can banned for malapropisms and general lack of vocabulary unfortunately. Shame.
Are bonapropisms okay?
Of course – they’re fantabulosa!
Lol m’y first comment IS “Awaiting for approval” or Indeed censorship
JD/TP – “How nice to varder your jolly old eek again”….I think we should test said algorithm with linguistically diverse invective – including palare !!
Luvvit!
He? She? I would suggest “it”.
Good example here of having cake and eating it (were you ambushed?) – the claim by your fellow covidites over the last two years is that just about all excess deaths in the pandemic have been caused by the pandemic. So generally all cause death should be a good comparison. Indeed, all cause excess deaths is the ‘gold standard’ as it is possible to adjust properly for population growth, age.
If this wasn’t the case, of course, it would be possible to maintain that there had been very little impact on mortality from the pandemic. That would be an odd thing for a covidite to advance.
Hmm.
I don’t know if you believe what you are writing but…
Vaccine efficacy can only be considered against the target disease.
The implication that it is to blame for a rise in all other deaths is obviously dishonest.
Not so – the efficacy of flu vaccine makes the assumption that excess mortality reflects influenza incidence.
If there had been a large increase in all-cause mortality with the introduction of flu vaccine, it would have raised the spectre of some severe adverse effects of vaccination, in the absence of other epidemics. In other words, a vaccine’s efficacy, or at least its value, is measured by the balance between decreased incidence of the target disease, and increased incidence of other conditions, if they may be suspected to be vaccine side-effects.
In the case of COVID, in many countries the largest COVID spike has been post-vaccine programme. No other epidemics have been prominent, and therefore any excess non-COVID mortality must be attributed to inteventions – either from lockdowns and/vaccinations.
So, extending your logic…
You would blame vaccines for an unvaccinated person getting run over by the proverbial bus.
It’s not logic, it’s just the latest anti-vaxx technique you have been taught.
No – it’s what I practised for an entire career in rational scientific medicine. And you?
Have you read any of the clinical trial data for vaccines?
The troll won’t answer that.
What… you practiced anti-vaxx techniques in your career?
You should refrain from dullard pejoratives. Just makes you look stupidly bigotted. These persons you insult are not against vaccination. They are simply against the covid jabs, which are not vaccines at all. Call them anti-marners – get it? Call me an anti-vaxxer. I am genuinely opposed to the outsourcing of the human immune system to mafia-Pharma and criminal government. Do some work on the vax issue on your own account. Research the findings of Dr Wakefield on autism. Ignore if you can the howling vilification and traducement of that ‘quintessential good doctor’. Ask yourself Cui Bono from that. And witness the simple statistically-undeniable fact that autism did not exist before mass vaccination of children. That’s all he was saying.
Those who use the term ‘anti-vaxxer’ are essentially recommending that you uncritically swallow any pill that an itinerant snake-oil salesman produces from his pocket. Which is a pretty good definition of gullible stupidity.
I’m no more of an anti-vaxxer than I am anti-smoking. Most people who seem to qualify for that term are what I would call pro-personal choice.
RH, I applaud your self restraint in deference to the “A”….Love to read what you really think..
Please give an example of “insults”
By Dr Wakefield, do you mean the fraudster?
If you are in his camp, insults could be justified.
You can read his paper online, have you done so? My response when I read it was I couldn’t believe why everyone was making such a fuss about it. It concludes with the very sensible suggestion that maybe we should consider further research. I think the only way he has been demonised is because most people don’t bother reading the paper.
It is also based on made up data.
That’s why he was struck-off.
Hard for any individual to commit fraud on Pfizer’s scale
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1358825646294769664.html
You seem to be batting for the SAGE team, yet you dare to use the term ‘fraudster’.
Balls of brass, I’d say.
Anyone seen Matt Handjob driving a bus of late?
Not qualified. (Although, on reflection, that didn’t slow his rise to minsterial responsibility.)
Rational – Are you secretly working as head of marketing for Pfizer by any chance. You seem to be applying some of their vaccine safety logic at least.
Other vaccines are available
I love “Other vaccines are available”. A real free market’eer here. If you die of Company X’s jab, you can always try the other brand next time.
That’s an amazing analogy. During this epidemic we’ve considered someone who catches covid and is then run over by a bus as being a covid death.
Now, that seems stupid, but actually is important for a new disease and is done on purpose. For example, the disease might impact on vision or the ability to assess risk (cognitive impairment) — these might not be apparent at an individual level, but might become apparent at population scale (via an increased tendency to be involved in accidents).
The odd thing, though, is that while this is an established logical approach, whenever it has been considered before it was in addition to the counting of deaths/injuries directly caused by the disease. Ie, you’d have a statistic for ‘definitely caused by the disease’ and another for ‘weird stuff in the statistics that might be important’.
It is only for covid that we only considered deaths with the disease, and didn’t count deaths from separately. From a disease epidemiological point of view this was a seriously weird way to count the impact of covid. It is like having morons in charge — there was a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of that approach.
Of course, it would be reasonable to take the same approach for any medicine as well, including vaccines — you really don’t know what the full impact is going to be and so it is best to consider everything. For a population scale vaccination programme like the covid vaccines the right approach would be to consider ‘obvious vaccine deaths’ and also pretty much all other hospitalisations/deaths as well. This would be fairly easy to do with modern big-data systems, particularly for the NHS. However, this just wasn’t done. So, if there was an impact on decision making skills that resulted in more people being run over by buses post vaccination, we just wouldn’t know.
It is rather bizarre that it wasn’t done properly. As it stands we’ve got little information on the broader impact of the vaccines on health.
I’d imagine that ‘run over by a bus but died of covid’ was welcomed enthusiastically by bus companies everywhere.
Yeah pass off their blatant scam as incompetence. They use transparently fraudulent ways to create convid deaths for terrorism and agenda purposes. Its not complicated.
Fauci hyped the “case” metric in the US and thereby inflated the IFR – the benefit of that was entirely towards his chums in the Pharma cartel – and “cases” was adopted by the rest of the world..
Sadly(?) for Herr Rational, the reported post jab deaths and adverse effects – unprecedented in recorded pharmacological intervention history by all accounts – are unanswerable testimony to the horrendously bad consequences inflicted on unsuspecting “crash test dummies” – patient treating physicians the world over know this – what does he “know” that they don’t?
You could blame vaccines for problems suffered by the vaccinated while their natural immunity was suppressed by the jab.
Which would explain some of the graphs showing the double-vaxxed (three jabs but within 14 days of needle) rather worse affected than some single-jabbed.
That’s not true is it. The only thing that can’t be gamed is the number of dead bodies.
Only a reduction in all cause mortality back to the levels we enjoyed before the Chinese released the plague would show that the measures against Covid were effective – to the levels claimed by supporters of the measures.
Otherwise it is whataboutery.
So, extending your logic…
You would blame vaccines for an unvaccinated person getting run over by the proverbial bus.
It’s not logic, it’s just the latest anti-vaxx technique you have been taught.
“So, extending your logic…
You would blame vaccines for an unvaccinated person getting run over by the proverbial bus.”
This is, after all, the logic used to calculate the numbers “killed by the virus” for much of the last two years. I don’t remember you complaining about that much here.
Of course the reality is that hardly anyone was killed by the virus alone, and as a consequence, hardly anyone can have been “saved” by the vaccine. So the vaccine development was essentially completely pointless from a public health perspective.
That just leaves all of the deaths and injuries caused by the vaccines. Which were all completely avoidable.
Lol! ‘rational’ is Hoist with his own petard.
A hundred upvotes! This is the point I have been banging on about. You, sir, are a scholar and a gent[*]
[*] replace with gender designator as appropriate.
Oh no, not that very lame proverbial bus again. You shills really need to get out more often.
There are so many local road works round here at present that the proverbial bus is just that.
Logic, logic, logic, yeah, logic, (panting furiously, sweating), aaaahhhhh!!!
https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillunusual/51350444870
amazing what gets people “excited”.
You are repeating yourself.
Desperate stuff trying to play a fallacy of composition. The individual is not the aggregate is it.
The gold standard is actuarial analysis, because they have quite a lot of skin in the game of mortality risk. They work at the level of all cause mortality, and actual risk managers who look at this are getting a little warm under the collar.
I’ll take the word of somebody with money on the line, and who understand statistics over a bunch of failed medics who can’t hack the front line any day of the week.
We’re just moving death around. We’re not stopping it. It’s a concern.
I understood from a presentation in the senate, that vaccine efficiency could only be determined by its effect on total life expectancy and not the specific disease. This was a deliberate medical policy because some early treatments could be shown as effective for their intended purpose yet increase overall mortality through, for example, inducing kidney failure.
NO! I’ve replied to you above. All cause mortality is the only way to assess efficacy and SAFETY.
So you would consider a vaccine that provided 100% protection against the target disease, but killed 50% of people in some other way, to be efficacious?
Everyone, stay calm. People like rational are useful, then provide a vehicle to provide meaningful answers and information which other, wavering, people my benefit from.
While you are right that vaccine efficacy/effectiveness is only considered against the target disease, there are broader considerations when it comes to vaccines.
There are effects such as viral interference, where vaccination increases the rate of other disease (suggested to be happening with the influenza vaccines), or increases immune maturity in general (suggested to happen with BCG). Beyond that, there’s other immunological effects (autoimmune problems are very important) and side effects to consider as well.
To only think that vaccines can only impact on the likelihood of the target disease and don’t have other immunological effects is naive. To be fair, this generally is true, but that’s because we weed out the troublesome vaccine candidates during extensive clinical trials/testing, leaving only those that actually work without untoward effects. Of course, if you curtail the testing early and release the vaccines to millions of people…
Ummm, so all cause mortality data has no relevance to a population with a very high % of “vaccinated” people…. such as Israel ?….keep trying.
OK.
Covid causes some deaths. This can be directly or due to not accessing or unable to access healthcare, adverse response to restrictions etc. So the pandemic and impact on society will cause deaths that are not due to the disease.
So vaccines are developed, which give people protection from the virus only. We measure the effectiveness for the purpose it is intended. That is well documented in clinical trials and real-world observations.
It is really that simple, if there is a rise in obesity and subsequent related deaths as a result of the pandemic (random hypothetical example). In what way is that due to the vaccine? Likewise all the other possible mechanisms.
Your argument seems to becoming commonplace, but it is nonsense.
Ah, our very own Captain Darling who hopes that posting will prevent his being sent to the front
Get off your backside, down the stores, and get to Ukraine
The traditions of the 77th need to be upheld
This midwit troll is particularly bad. At least with some of the older ones, they would make some progress and occasionally say something interesting. Some of them even picked up a little scepticism. This one though is something else entirely, and for the first time I think it may be a genuine 77th.
Why not reply with some reasoning?
He’s not actually your regular troll. I’ve seen him on a forum where he tries really hard to be intellectual and erudite. He actually posed a question (a really stupid question) on this forum which was directed at Daily Sceptic journalist, Will Jones.
The utter fool actually expected Will Jones to engage with him. Can you imagine coming on here and expecting one of this site’s journalists to engage with you in the comment’s threads? A person would have to be more than just an idiot to expect it.
What he does is he spends time on his forum attempting to be Shakespearian. But his attempts at being intellectual is like putting a Saville Row suit on a tramp, regardless of the thousand pound suit, you’ll still know it’s a tramp that is wearing it.
He won’t get any interaction on his forum, the hundreds of thousands of commenters that he thinks should come and worship him never show up. So, he’ll then come to a thread like this for a while to take out his frustration at not being recognised for the genius he is.
He has a personality disorder and is highly narcissistic. The best way to deal with him is to not engage with him directly, but to talk about him to commenters that have replied to him.
He’ll read every single comment that he suspects refers to him. His narcissism will force him to read them. In spite of his idiocy, he’s actually looking for acceptance, but he’s never had any friends in the real world, so he doesn’t really know what acceptance is. He confuses worship and adulation with acceptance/friendship.
Reason Will Jones didn’t answer was that he could not justify his misrepresentation of the evidence he presents.
Perhaps you could explain why the question was stupid and then explain why it is not misrepresentation.
A good reply with reasoning, rather than just abuse would be impressive an welcome.
Or Will Jones doesn’t give a shite about you or me and is sat drinking a good 85 Dom in the Groucho club with Tory boy Toby, piss coming out of their eyes because somebody wrote a swear on their site.
Of course they care about you. Nobody could resist your charm.
That is the trouble with dealing with robots. Artifical intelligence will only take them so far. They only operate from a limited pool of information, lack reasoning ability and inevitably keep saying the same thing.
Certainly not the first time, otherwise I am with you.
ROTFL:-)
I think I might have got under rational’s skin, he’s gone on a bit of a frenzy below.
More power to your elbow.
you’ve got to be kidding, cluster b personalities would never pass the psychological exam.
I hope he donates to DS, all the narcissistic supply he gets here surely deserves a donation.
‘rational’. Funny. Bless your little camouflage socks.
Why not reply with some reasoning?
Copy and pasting makes you look like a bot.
01010100000100010010
You go first.
When are we going to see some logic, facts and reasoning from you?
Why don’t you go back to your forum, where you and your band of idiot companions dribble and drool at each other.
By the way, we found your attempt to get Will Jones to engage with you on the forum hilarious. What an utter fool you are, you actually thought this journalist would take the time to answer a moronic, half-witted question you posed.
You really think you are important, don’t you? Mr Personality Disorder, with a strong narcissistic bent. Who enjoys being the village idiot.
Well stop engaging for God’s sake.
I couldn’t help it
The urge to offer some abuse was too strong, was it?
Why not reply with some reasoning?
Why not reply with some reasoning?
Especially if you have no reasoned argument to present.
I am deeply hurt by your words.
How mean of you.
Classic sealioning.
Which is exactly what should be done. It makes the debate about “with” Covid or “from” Covid redundant. It also means that deaths which are solely due to the vaccine are included – so we see the net effect.
Remember, the argument put forward is that Covid is a deadly pandemic. If true this should be evident in all cause mortality figures. Similarly if the vaccine is as effective as claimed then, with the vast majority of the elderly population vaccinated, there should be significant reduction in all cause mortality.
Interventions and vaccinations are useless if they make no difference to overall mortality.
I can only think from that drivel you head-wanded that the wheels are falling off your little scheme and you’re not sleeping well at night?
Mornin’ Spud.
Actually it is the opposite — all cause death is a vitally important statistic during an epidemic. Only focusing on covid mortality will miss many important effects.
I think missing many important effects is precisely what they want.
Watch Professor Normal Fenton explain why all-cause mortality is a better indicator than covid mortality between vaxed and unvaxxed groups.
I think that you’ve missed a lower case ir at the beginning of your moniker.
Let’s call this out for what it is – lies, built upon lies, built upon more lies. It’s like the UKHSA surveillance reports which show rates of death amongst unvaxxed 30+ times more likely than vaxxed, but then show vaxxed to contribute to 75+% of total deaths. Anyone with a rudimentary understanding of maths (or even common sense) can see that it’s a load of BS. Still, the herd follow the propaganda like good little citizens.
As long as the readership is left with the takeaway that Convid is a legit illness, not a rebranding of “old normal” illnesses and deceitful use of an unvalidated test for an unvalidated illness, the article is a great success.
Very well put.
You will be able to illustrate the maths errors then.
You have made the claim – prove it!
Off subject
For the past two years the railways have treated their customers like the scum of the earth
This has included getting the police to beat the customers up and spray them with CS gas
However all is well that ends well, the railways are now offering the customers a free cup of tea
I’m not allowed to swear so I won’t
And this relates to vaccine effectiveness? How?
Next you will be blaming potholes on vaccines.
I know your Commanding Officer
In two weeks time you will be in an icy trench in the Ukraine
Good luck
Here, I’ll swear for you.
Brilliant
The mortality curve for covid has always been identical to that for normal lifespans. So for the “vaccines” to “work” would basically mean that they have the power to make the population live longer than they ordinarily would have done. If anyone can show me that then I will believe they “work”.
Latest mortality and adverse effects figures suggest “vaccine” toxicity has been underestimated.
You fall for misinformation quite easily.
You encourage misinformation.
Stop fekking about, just say what many many people are thinking, the cytotixic medical intervention is harming and killing people in the thousand’s, potentially millions!
Cause and effect, correlation, causation…the mounting death figures since the rollout of the jabs cannot be explained in any other way…If it looks like a rat, it smells like a rat, guess what? It’s a giant Rattus rattus. There’s a plague coming, and it’s jab induced!
Sorry, the world is not that exciting. I know you have not taken your vaccine, but have you taken your pills?
?
“post-vaccination waves have been as or more deadly than pre-vaccination waves. Such data are hard to reconcile with claims of 90% vaccine effectiveness against death.”
Uh, no, it only means that the delta variant was overall deadlier than the previous ones. There, I reconciled it for you. The 90% is not some mysterious absolute protection but refers to relative risk reduction compared to unvaccinated. And you know that, and still you write bollocks.
You are correct, of course.
On a related aspect, it’s strange how these ant-vaxxers can one minute say there are only few deaths from omicron, then the next minute use infection numbers to illustrate the deadliness of the same thing.
It really is a desperate and obviously flawed technique. I’m starting to believe even they don’t actually believe it, but can’t back away from their political stance.
“Few deaths from Omicron” even based on their own methodology. That’s the caveat you intentionally leave out. They justify their measures on this so it is important to keep a foot in both camps.
We’ve known for a long time on here Delta and the rest were overblown. It’s inevitable given how it is counted.
No you just forgot to say thanks to the vaccines and the vaccinated.
They are the heroes of your narrative, but you hadn’t realised.
TROLL ALERT
The troll is now so glued to this site that it appears as the first commenter, breathlessly waiting for a new post to appear so as to add some trash and hijack the comments thread.
Just answer the questions with reasoning and logic, if you can.
Though you can’t.
I have very much enjoyed the Daily Sceptic over the past years, and especially the comment section, but that ridiculous bit of comma free bossy boots at the the top now is absurd in a free speech setting. Ban criminal posts, sure. But swearwords and rudeness? That’s free speech. Thank you, Toby, Will etc, and especially all you guys here. But I’m off, no more reading the site, out of my in box, I’m through.
Reddit awaits. Come join our group there
Is a fundamental part of British culture.
I’m of a mind to join you tbh, 2 years and 298 pages with multiple articles later it may well be time to try and put some distance between myself and Covid. This feels like the straw that breaks.
Sp!ked online did the same around 2018 by by getting rid of their comment section. Never been able to find out why. I was a regular commenter there from 2013 on their Disqus platform and there wasn’t a subject that would get censored. Problem is, I can’t show my disapprovel if I can’t comment.
I don’t know if this is what happened here but I have seen on other sites that they are targeted by trolls who stir up aggression amongst the rest of the commenters. The trolls would then report them to the moderator, or the moderator would take action themselves, resulting in multiple commenters getting banned, but no action taken against the agent provocateur. This happened over on the Telegraph when they used to use disqus, and also on order-order.com
The net effect is that debate gets restricted or shut down, and/or regular commenters move elsewhere, which is no doubt the primary purpose of the trolling in the first place.
This has definitely come about all of a sudden because of a troll (rational) riling people up.
Who knows if he’s doing it for himself, because he has a bit of a twisted mind or for someone.
But if he continues on here in the same way long enough, I expect he’ll drive plenty of people out.
I’m all for trying to see a reasonable argument where there is one. So far, all I’m seeing from him is relentless argumentativeness for its own sake. It’s very tiresome and pretty disruptive for people who come here for a different view to the MSM one.
Just try to justify your views, then.
If you have a reasoned and evidenced argument, then let’s see it.
You are good at demanding reasoned, evidence-based argument from others, but you are abysmal at providing it yourself. Physician, heal thyself.
Yes.
It’s about ruddy time the Mods stepped in and gave the obvious trolls a warning.
Civilised behaviour doesn’t appeal then?
What a load of b***ocks this is.
Imagine having “chronic lower respiratory diseases”, “Covid-19”, and “influenza and pneumonia” as separate categories!
Covid requires the presence of double pneumonia, which is a disease of the lungs, which are part of the lower respiratory tract. You can’t have “Covid-19” without having “chronic lower respiratory disease”.
Nor is there any clear indication of what the conjunction “and” means in the phrase “influenza and pneumonia” – does it refer to patients who had both, or patients who had one or the other or both? – but to expect it to have a clear meaning would probably be a mistake.
Official statistics in Britain are as big a pile of turd as ever they were in the USSR, and this fact is right there, staring us in the face. To use an expression that has become a cliché since the crimes of Jimmy Savile had to be officially admitted, it is “hiding in plain sight”.
Yes. I’m amazed at the repetition of related fundamental errors in some ATL articles.
Hi Star,
You said “Covid requires the presence of double pneumonia”.
I am genuinely curious if that is true, not trying to catch you out. My knowledge on this shitshow it increasing day by day and I’m trying to find sources from people that are actual truth. Would you mind showing me where you found that info? Also, I can’t directly message people on this which is why I’m replying to your message instead of messaging you directly.
I’ve got to point now where I do not believe a single word coming out of the mouths of this disgraceful government and its minions.
The stages over the years have gone like this: General acceptance of the narrative > Noticing anomalies in the narrative > Delving further into official claims > Noticing serious anomalies in the narrative > Performing own research and the unveiling of hidden information > Noticing very serious anomalies in the narrative > Realising deliberate disinformation practices and lying has taken place > Climate Change event > Covid event > Understanding we live in the Truman Show
Much easier to see what is going on when you look at individual years rather than make comparisons with 5 year averages.
This is the chart of age standardised mortality from 2001 for England (they don’t provide combined England and Wales data).
The dotted lines are the years from 2001 to 2010 and the solid lines are years from 2011. The solid red line is 2021 and you can see this latest ASM figure at the December plot.
What we are seeing is quite high mortality relative to recent years from 2011 due to the disastrous response to the pandemic and vaccine related deaths. How that splits out between the two main factors is hard to say.
But to put it in context it doesn’t take us back to the levels of mortality experienced in some bad Decembers from 2001 to 2010.
Now some signs that mortality is quite low so far in January, perhaps because there are less vulnerable older people alive, and so the usual January increased Winter mortality may be less than normal, counterbalancing these other factors. So this may be reflected in January’s ASM when it is announced in February.
Nice chart. Mortality rates seem to have been significantly lower in 2011-21 than in 2001-11, so considering a 10-year dataset might be in order. Looking at 2011-21 the standard deviation for the month of December seems to have been (at a very rough estimate) about 10%. If we look at 2001-21, it’s a few percent higher. Nothing special that is determinable from mortality statistics seems to have gone on in December 2021. The figure for that month doesn’t seem to be much more than ONE standard deviation out from the 10-year mean.
The main conclusion from the chart would be that there was a bit of a spike for a month or so, two years ago. That’s hardly surprising, given that inmates of “care homes” were being left to choke to death, including after other inmates of the same “homes” had been dumped back there from hospital after testing positive for SARS.
This is the same chart with only years from 2011 showing
I would hazard a guess ( highly ‘rational’), that there are only two incidents. The first as Rick H describes, the criminal behaviour towards elderly in hospitals and care homes in April 2020. And the same age group suffering from being injected with something their already damaged immune systems could not cope with in January/February 2021.
As it was supposed to be this age group that were the recipients of all the ‘protection’ given by the lockdowns/vaccines ( don’t kill granny etc), its an absolutely shocking indication of an appalling so-called public health initiative. It cost the country over £2,000bn and ended up killing the very people it was supposed to ‘save’.
Of course we should never forget ‘its not about what they say its about’.
The evacuation of elderly from hospitals to care homes was indeed a stupid mistake.
The rest of what you write in nonsense.
It was emphatically not a mistake – it was a deliberate policy, both here and in the US; it might have been ill informed ( me being fair minded but also possibly delusional!) – but it was certainly an intentional act.
And the same chart with just 2001 to 2010 together with 2020 and 2021 (i.e 2011 to 2019 taken out)
That big spike there must’ve been the Swine Flu!
With a bit of help with a known sedative!
The short-term variations in mortality are not really significant – with the exception of the April 2020 spike – and this is explicable by the two factors of dry tinder and the rapid nosocomial spread generated by the incompetent care home and hospital policy. However, the annual mortality was unexceptional even with that peak.
The best contextual visualization remains the century graph of yearly mortality.
“incompetent care home and hospital policy”….Or perhaps deliberate. Same in US and other places, in ‘Lockstep’.
what about the winter 20/21 spike?
That is a very important point.
We’ve lost all sense of perspective.
There just aren’t unusual health problems crisis caused by a respiratory virus.
Already there was an overreaction to what was experienced in March 2020.
But now? There is literally nothing of note going around, other than some form of societal level post-traumatic stress disorder from the panic induced by the government.
“December’s overall age-standardised mortality rate was 9.3% higher than the five-year average.”
So what?
What’s the 20-year spread about the mean for the month of December? I’d hazard the guess that 9.3% is a lot less than 2.0 standard deviations out.
If you like, you could calculate the SD.
The 20 year spread about the mean is a meaningless as the ASMR has been dropping steadily over the last 20 years. What is needed is the mean deviation from the trend.
I’m a bit worried about Rayc, they seem to have become a little inconsistent. Are you ok Ray? Some days you are very clear and others less so.
There are a few people commenting here who are sceptical about everything except the vaccines, and get quite hot under the collar when the vaccines are criticised or questioned.
I’m not sure whether this is a genuine position or not. It is hard not to be sceptical about the vaccines when you compare the promises about their effectiveness and safety versus the reality.
It’s understandable that journalists on newspapers like The Telegraph may be anti-lockdown but pro-vaccine, given the extent to which these publications are financed by the Gates Foundation which is heavily invested in vaccines, but harder to understand in “independent” commenters below the line.
I think rayc is pretty genuine and his position seems just about tenable, and he’s against mandates. I would like to see his views on vaccination the healthy and not-very-vulnerable and kids, and on informed consent. I am not at all convinced the vaxx is worth it for anyone, but even if it is, I have real problems with the mass vaxxing going on and the way it is being done and it’s hard to see how any sceptic could support it without some doublethink.
I wish people would stop responding to rational and .rayc. They are both boring trolls but effective at side-swiping discussions.
Dear Rational
Please define exactly what you mean by the terms “anti-vaxx” and “anti-vaxxer”
Those that publicly state false or misleading information on vaccines with the effect that it may influence others to refuse vaccination.
Who, here, has stated false or misleading information?
One of the things that sets LockdownSceptics apart from many other news sites is that the articles above and the comments below the line are full of references to data and are not just opinions or feelings.
Well the headline of this article is misleading, for a start.
My position on covid “vaccines” and on mass covid vaccination is as follows:
1) There is not, and never has been, a public health emergency that warrants vaccines being given an emergency license
2) The long term safety trials are incomplete and have been irrevocably compromised by the control group being given the vaccines
3) Vaccine mandates and coercion are morally wrong under all circumstances
4) Any attempt at informed consent for covid vaccines is impossible because the data one needs to see has been deliberately suppressed/compromised/obfuscated/not collected
5) Available data shows that the vaccines make no sense for any but the most vulnerable, and any benefit for the vulnerable is hard to spot
6) Vaccinating children with these vaccines is simply evil
7) The vaccines don’t stop the spread of covid therefore arguments that they protect others and vaxx passports are just evil lies
Does that make me anti-vaxx?
8) Vaxxing everyone two or three or four or more times at the cost of billions is a criminal waste of public money that could have been spent on treating sick people or myriad other good causes (ditto mass testing)
I would add that vaccine policies; either mandates or pseudo mandates ( as in France) are clearly politically motivated. This is beneath contempt.
It makes you an anti-experimental-gene-therapy-er…
When people ask me if I’m vaccinated and I say “no” and then they say “are you an anti-vaxxer?!” I just point out that both my children have had all the usual vaccines that have got years of safety data.
I then point out that they too are not “vaccinated” – they’ve just buggered around with their cells so that they produce spike proteins.
They clearly don’t work otherwise you wouldn’t have to keep taking them every 3 months
As Peter Doshi, Associate Editor of the BMJ pointed out, these ‘vaccines’ wouldn’t get much take up if they were properly described as ‘gene therapies’, which is what they are.
And the suppression of ivermectin is criminal.
So you’re an anti-vaxxer? I’ve never seen you quote accurate absolute risk reduction figures, or the abnormally high level of adverse events, or the fact that there is no adequate safety data from trials, or that there is a massive trail of conflicting interests around their promotion? Those omissions are all ‘misleading’ in information terms.
Can you give an ARR for the Pfizer vaccine independent of the current prevalence?
As you are fully aware the only ARR figures we have had available were from the initial trials on a very few people. They showed less than 1%. Since then its been made deliberately impossible to track.
It isn’t just a matter of lacking data. The important point is that ARR is a function of prevalence (aka baseline risk) – so in the case of this virus the ARR will change dramatically between different countries and from one month to another.
If ARR is 1%, against AR= 2%
Then half the number of people die.
If ARR is 0.9%, against AR= 1%
Then the death toll is cut byto 1/10
I should add that it is easy to calculate the ARR for any situation given the prevalence and vaccine effectiveness. So it is far from being impossible to track. It is just a meaningless number in this context because the prevalence varies so wildly.
This is correct.
If you are judging vaccines, then Relative risk is key indicator.
Now I know you are either a bare faced liar, a SAGE/Pharma puppet, massively blinkered or so scared that the jabs you have had are doing you untold harm that you are desperately trying to convince yourself of the opposite – or all of the above; the scam of quoting RRR rather than ARR has been revealed by many more qualified statisticians than me. The ARR is the inconvenient data that “vaccine” apparatchiks don’t like to see because it slaughters the idiotic and ignorant fetish for injecting people with a still experimental, very shoddily tested drug; and totally unnecessary as demonstrated by physicians world wide who have – very successfully – developed early treatments for infected patients – or do you think that real world clinical experience data is all “made up”?
But , if you want a lay person’s explanation – consult Dr Kendrick – he knows how and can explain this scam better than me.
You’ve never seen me quote data, as I don’t make things up.
BTW absolute risk reduction is “relative risk”
Trials are about efficacy and safety. Read them.
Adverse events must be compared against background rates. Do that.
So, not those who state true information on vaccines with the effect that it may influence others to refuse vaccination then.
Unfortunately the media and various government officials are calling people who speak truth to power ‘anti-vaxxers’ if the truth about vaccines causes any ‘vaccine hesitancy’.
What true information would that be?
You would include successive SoS for Health, the PM, SAGE and numerous others??
How do you account for the fact that the UK government’s own website stated the lack of efficacy for these jabs…? That a certain Pharma CEO stated similarly?
What are the long term effects of the inflammatory and clotting responses induced by the jabs?
leave the effin troll be. It’s sealioning.
Do not feed.
For goodness sake don’t argue with people that use reasoning and real information.
You just end up looking silly.
If you are referring to yourself here, you are seriously deluded. You are the exact opposite of the moniker you have chosen.
That’s funny. A few days ago we were being told that deaths were well below the five year average.
This article partly depends upon the data on ‘Covid deaths’ being accurate – which is an error that has been long established. It is highly unlikely that ‘Covid’ is as fatal as portrayed in the bar chart. Combine it with other respiratory disease, and you have a much more credible picture.
Of course, the all-cause data is all that we can depend on – and that certainly gives no grounds for a ‘vaccine’ impact of note. But, that said, mortality remains within normal variation (the ‘five year average’, however, is not a credible baseline – it can’t capture the picture of that variation.)
Surely the relevant question is how many people died because of the pandemic? Without doing the maths it appears from the chart that the ASMR for 2020 was about 100 deaths per 100,000 greater than expected. This means about 67,000 people died in England as a result of the pandemic. The fact that more people died six years ago seems little compensation.
“The fact that more people died six years ago seems little compensation.” I am not sure compensation is the point. The point is we’re not seeing EXCEPTIONAL mortality in historic terms meaning that exceptional measures that purport to combat it are not justified.
Exceptional is a subjective judgement. The absolute ASMR may not be historically exceptional but a jump of 10% in one year is exceptional. Had there been 67,000 additional deaths due to terrorism I think there would have been support for some pretty drastic measures. But anyway is there a rule that says a problem has to be exceptional to justify exceptional measures?
Well, to get round it being subjective you could perform a cost-benefit analysis.
And yes, measures should always be proportionate to the thing they are supposed to address – no-one is really disputing that.
I have no problem with a cost-benefit analysis. But cost is not the same exceptionality. A major cost may be quite unexceptional. If an exceptional measure can save 67,000 lives it really doesn’t matter if that is an exceptional number of deaths or not – provided the saving justifies the cost.
Well yes I suppose so but generally speaking exceptional measures that work would be exceptionally costly
You are deliberately missing the clear evidence that there were two incidents of exceptional deaths, both affecting the already elderly and with comorbidities. The cost benefit analysis is rather simple, and absolutely damning.
This is very confusing. I am arguing that the deaths are exceptional and you seem to be agreeing.
The reason that deaths were limited are due to measures taken to slow infection.
That’s conjecture. Stare at graphs from around the world and outcomes have varied independently of measures.
Had anyone been “fully vaccinated”?
I thought the criteria for “Fully vaccinated” was 14 days after the second dose. Since we didn’t start the rollout until December 8th, it’s difficult to see how anyone could have been fully vaccinated before the end of Jan.
It’s about time Noah Carl, Will Jones, Toby Young et al who write these articles actually start questioning the fact that all the studies which show “vaccine” effectiveness at reducing hospitalisation and deaths are flawed.
It appears the jabs do no such thing as reduce hospitalisation and deaths and in fact make them worse.
We’ve had many articles on the negative effectiveness of the jabs on transmission and infection.
Perhaps it’s time they bite the bullet and write articles on the negative effectiveness of the jabs on hospitalisation and deaths even for the vulnerable and elderly.
It’s fine to write articles, so long as they are not misleading.
They are generally misleading.
If commented upon, by someone there is never an evidenced support of the article…just tribal chants.
Show me an evidenced report or scientific study showing that the experimental jabs are effective against hospitalisation and death.
Here it is vaccine surveillance report. Published weekly.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1050721/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-4.pdf
Even the UKHSA in the Vaccine Surveillance Report state ……
“These raw data should not be used to estimate vaccine effectiveness”.
Do vaccines reduce hospitalisations and death?
“The vaccines do not reduce all-cause mortality, but rather produce genuine spikes in all-cause mortality shortly after vaccination.”
Dr. Martin Neil is Professor in Computer Science and Statistics at Queen Mary, University of London. Dr. Clare Craig is a Diagnostic Pathologist. Dr. Norman Fenton is Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University of London. The paper is also authored by Jonathan Engler, Joshua Guetzkow, Scott Mclachlan, Jessica Rose, Dan Russell and Joel Smalley.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357778435_Official_mortality_data_for_England_suggest_systematic_miscategorisation_of_vaccine_status_and_uncertain_effectiveness_of_Covid-19_vaccination
Summarised here ……
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/21/do-covid-vaccines-reduce-all-cause-mortality-ons-data-give-us-no-reason-to-think-so/
The view that vaccines have a 90% effectiveness of reducing hospitalisation and death is flawed due to a number of reasons including the ‘healthy vaccinee’ effect.
A study published last year by the U.S. CDC found that vaccinated people were less likely to die of non-Covid causes, suggesting that they’re inherently healthier and/or more risk averse than unvaccinated people.
Those who are unvaccinated that end up in hospital and die could quite easily be due to the “unhealthy unvaccinated” effect.
Someone who is too ill or frail to have the jab is more likely to end up in hospital and the data shows that they were “unvaccinated” without any enquiry on their overall health status.
A rough sleeper or anyone else who is not on any health records who ends up in hospital is regarded as “unvaccinated”.
Someone who had the vaccination less than 20 days previously is regarded as unvaccinated. So if they end up in hospital due to vaccine injury or vaccine induced health problems they are regarded as unvaccinated.
All these “healthy vaccinee”, “unhealthy unvaccinated” and vaccine injured people within 20 days of the jab are skewing the figures making the jabs look a lot more effective than they really are (if they are effective at all).
We all know that the ONS has grossly underestimated the unjabbed population by the many articles on this website.
The people who gather the data conveniently say that they are not allowed to show the unjabbed health status as it would contravene data protection laws.
I still haven’t seen any hard evidence that the jab is actually working.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/01/21/more-evidence-for-the-healthy-vaccinee-effect/?fbclid=IwAR2ZVwNrlRXt0CPd0cfGfIb_UgIRgdXU7WENO7K0jYgFy_k3nfyCWeXJy4Y
Please stop responding to this idiot.
Is ‘idiot’ allowed?
If it’s not allowed at least it is accurate.
The vaccine trials may have overestimated effectiveness against death because they didn’t include enough old people or those with serious health conditions
And real world data?
Plenty of old people there.
I think that just as there are some problems judging vaccine effectiveness from the COVID-19 “cases/serious illnesses/deaths” figures, given how questionable much of this COVID statistics are, there are also problems judging it from the all causes mortality numbers.
Using all causes mortality does at least include vaccine-related deaths and injuries in the picture, but it also includes mortality resulting from other aspects of the pandemic response such as decline in people’s health from isolation, lack of exercise, reduction in NHS services like cancer screening, routine treatment for diabetes, mental health etc. as well as suicides and other deaths caused indirectly by the pandemic response.
Correct
Since (a) the excess deaths in 2020 (ie., before any vaccine rollouts) are nothing special (all cause mortality lower than any year up to 2008) and (b) the age-related mortality distribution for Covid19 deaths is the same as all-cause deaths, it is difficult to see how vaccinations or, TBH, any treatment[*], can make any significant difference to all-cause mortality rates (because, in reality, Covid19 has not resulted in many extra deaths).
[*] This is not to say that treatment should not be attempted at the level of individuals who are seriously ill with Covid19.
Snap.
I’m sure Noah is aware of this paper, but this is the article in the BMJ which set 2020 mortality in context with previous years, taking demographics into account, and found it was not nearly as exceptional as the media would have us believe, being only the worst year for age standardised mortality since 2008:
Whilst we are arguing about this, the UK government has started the process of altering the Human Rights Act and I quote:
“The government is committed to updating the Human Rights Act 1998. This consultation seeks views on the government’s proposals to revise the Human Rights Act and replace it with a Bill of Rights, in order to restore a proper balance between the rights of individuals, personal responsibility and the wider public interest.”
Human Rights Act Reform: A Modern Bill of Rights – GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
The consultation phase ends in about five or six weeks!
Another stitch up on the way.
Richard Littlejerk in the Mail today advising people about masks:
But back on the 18th February 2021 we had a very different Richard Littlejerk:
Richard Littlejerk went in a short space of time from being a “throw ‘em against the wall and shoot ‘em” type of guy, to being a gallant hero protecting the poor villagers from the dragon called Mask.
What a two-faced shameless twat. In fact, “You couldn’t make it up”.
It looks like all the easy government money the Mail earned publishing lying propaganda about the “goodness of the ‘vaccines’” might have finally dried up. And now Littlejerk and the Mail are attempting to lure back the ordinary people that built their newspaper in the first place.
I hope people don’t forget that the Mail and Littlejerk took the devil’s shilling and sold out people that had been loyal to them for decades. They’ll try to lure these people back again, but would sell them out again the minute the government dangled some more treasonous shillings in front of them.
If anything good comes out of this plandemic, I hope it’s that people don’t forget who the trash were that could have made a massive difference, but instead took the Nazi shilling and turned on their own.
I think opinion writers are not paid to be consistent, they are paid to rush to judgement and argue one side. I guess to some extent, the more controversial the better (within reason) – controversy generates clicks.
That’s brilliant FW. Thank you.
Littlejohn and his ilk run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Next they’ll be spinning the yarn that they spearheaded the resistance against lockdown tyranny.
So we’re now in a situation (see exchanges with ‘rational’ – who is a troll in spirit, if not in employment) where the intelligentsia has been divided into two camps with diametrically opposed and deeply entrenched interpretations of the event we have all just witnessed; both believe they’ve got the data to support their beliefs and believe the other side to be not just wrong but mad, all the while refusing to look at or listen to each others’ evidence. We have as a culture, whether intentionally or not, been radically destabilised.
OK..
What’s your reasoning for using all cause mortality as an argument for vaccine effectiveness, rather than covid deaths?
I’m not, and haven’t anywhere on this thread – I’m making a point about deeply entrenched opinions that aren’t open to counterargument. Why are you trying to prove people you believe to be idiots, wrong? Why is that worth your time?
Not quite. The, ahem “rational” (the word not the troll) side of the argument is always willing to look at the contrary evidence. Unfortunately it invariably turns out to be dodgy modelling, anecdotal, nonsense meta-studies, big pharma or fauci funded, or fact checkers. It doesn’t take long to burn through that crap.
Here’s you refusing to consider contrary evidence.
Age standardised mortality hides many sins; I’m not sure that it is a particularly helpful statistic in times like these.
Eg, if mortality rates doubled for those aged 40-50, it wouldn’t change age standardised mortality very much at all.
Yes, I agree age standardised mortality hides what’s happening across all ages.
The banded ASM for 0-74 for England that the ONS also publish is slightly better for seeing what is happening at slightly younger ages although still heavily concentrated on the age groups just under 74. The under 74 ASM hasn’t really shown any drop-off since about July.
And same chart with years from 2011 only on it.
Vaccine injuries in the DOD and the attempted cover-up
Further analysis of Thomas Renz’s claims to the congress committee chaired by senator Ron Johnson.
Warning – ominous background music.
https://trmlx.com/vaccine-injuries-in-the-dod-and-the-attempted-cover-up/
Pfizer have published plans to study the effect of the vax on military personnel with the agreement and co-operation of the Department of Defense.
The DoD is mandating the use of the original EUA authorised vax, even though this must be illegal.
The cominarty vax had its license granted and withdrawn on the same day 23 Aug 2021. And yet army personnel who refused the illegally mandated vax were illegally removed from services.
Secretary of Defense owns over 29 thousand shares in a company that made a vast amount of money in Pfizers vax.
https://tcp.art.blog/2022/01/23/covid-the-strange-death-of-medicine/
If there was any good left in the doctor’s role, it was as a benevolent arbiter for the patient, heavily armed with the shields of medical ethics: physician independence, patient choice, patient confidentiality, informed consent, bodily autonomy, beneficence, justice and primary non-maleficence…….. Today, in a tryst with evil, we indulge in the reverse. We peddle fear and connive with exploitative drug barons to push their dangerous, experimental and unnecessary genetic potions. Covid is the friend of Pharma. The people are the enemy, the fodder of the corporate biosecurity state.
We all got O level chemistry, physics and biology and this shit is way below O level standard. I don’t even bother with these people there days. They talk like they’re mentally sub-normal. This was obvious from day one: that there was no serious conversation going on here. We need to have a sense of perspective.
I suggest we all flag every single one of the troll’s comments, but refuse to acknowledge it in any other way. Please don’t engage it in debate – don’t even down tick!
It’s here to derail the debate, please don’t let it succeed.
I see the troll has done a fine job of hijacking the entire comment section of this article.
“Overestimated” by whom? Surely no-one with an active brain?
When are we going to get real about this disastrous and deadly fake “vaccines” scam?
These are a dangerous mRNA ‘Gene Therapy’ injection experiment and the consequence of the crass irresponsibly of allowing their use will be a global medical disaster for humanity.
The Human Rights Act Reform March 8th. Would it be possible to write an article on how this act reform will affect the unvaxxed? Would it become possible to mandate covid vaxxes for the greater good under this reform? Is this being done because we are no longer part of the EU or is it being done for other reasons? Where are the legal experts in the UK fighting for all of our human rights?
So “saying people should bé k…d and using shwearwords will get you banned” has become “Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban”. IS this website an offshoot of thé Daily Telegraph/UK GOVT -Dept-of-wilfully-misleading -the-masses-and-State-Propaganda?
I was wondering, does this count as profanity?
TRUCK FUDEAU!
Nice cartoon by the way Bob’
Interesting to see whether I get banned for potential profanity.
Toby, I am by the way a fully paid-up Gold Member of FSU (Free Speech Union, in case anyone thought “FSU” was an acronym for something nastier).
These new rules worry me slightly and not because I’m an advocate of ‘fruity’ language.
So pretty much as has been said all along, that covid was on par with a bad flu season.
I see that there was another ‘medical incident’ among spectators at a football match yesterday, unfortunately resulting in a fatality.
Normally you would hear of one such incident a season. Now they occur on an almost weekly basis. I wonder why that is.