Today’s Telgraph says a majority of the Cabinet want Boris to accelerate the timetable for ending the lockdown.
Boris Johnson is under pressure to ease the lockdown restrictions causing “massive damage” to the economy, with the majority of the Cabinet understood to support a major “back to work” drive next month.
Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, is among ministers who have expressed concerns about the long-term “scarring” to the economy being caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Provided there is no unexpected increase in the rate of virus infections over the next 10 days, they want the Prime Minister to allow as many businesses as possible to reopen in order to get the country moving again.
According to Gordon Raynor, the Telegraph‘s political editor, the three most hawkish members of the Cabinet – remember, in the current vernacular hawkish means cautious, not bold – are Matt Hancock, Michael Gove and the Prime Minister. But the doves seem to be gaining ground. Conservative peers Baroness Noakes and Lord Dobbs have both chastised the Government for being over cautious, with Dobbs saying “lockdown means poverty”.
The former Tory work and pensions minister Baroness Buscombe urged the Government to be “proportionate” in a House of Lords debate yesterday and reduce the social distancing rule to one metre, calling for schools to reopen “to free up the workforce and to stem the tide of this, frankly, with respect, cultural and economic suicide”.
Meanwhile, the Times reports that the Treasury borrowed more last month than in the whole of last year (£62.1 billion). According to the Office for National Statistics, the Government hasn’t borrowed that much in a single month since records began.
Public Inquiry-Induced Paralysis
According to Fraser Nelson’s column in today’s Telegraph, a new joke is going round Whitehall:
When an awkward question about Covid comes up, someone will say: “Well, tell that to the inquiry.”
But as Fraser points out, this isn’t funny. On the contrary, the paranoia gripping members of the Government and the Civil Service about how they’re likely to judged in the forthcoming inquiry is preventing them from taking decisive action in case it has adverse consequences and they end carrying the can. “I know one Cabinet member who is keeping meticulous, exculpatory notes of his actions with a dateline starting in January,” writes Fraser.
Normally, we’d expect the Prime Minister to be the one mobilising the English language to stirring national effect but instead he’s starting to look like the most cautious leader in Europe. Perhaps he is stung by the failure of the lockdown to limit deaths and thinks he cannot afford another political risk, especially if he plans a high-stakes Brexit gambit. Perhaps he worries an early move to reopen the economy would be too divisive – contravening his pledge to reconcile a country torn by the referendum.
The Prime Minister tells colleagues that they’ll be forgiven for mistakes going into this crisis, but not for mistakes coming out. He’s right. But if he’s late out of lockdown, he will be walking straight into that second mistake.
YouTube’s Red Pen
Yesterday, when linking to Freddie Sayers’s interview with Sunetra Gupta on UnHerd, I said, “Watch it before YouTube takes it down.” That was intended as a joke – surely, YouTube wouldn’t take down an interview with the Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford, however much she dissented from Covid orthodoxy?
But then I discovered that YouTube had removed Freddie’s interview with Professor Karol Sikora, Dean of Buckingham University Medical School. According to Freddie, the video “violated” YouTube’s “guidelines” and his appeal for it to be reinstated was rejected. Freddie tweeted about this last night, several people weighed in to criticise YouTube’s decision (including me), and the video has now been reinstated.
Will the interview with Professor Gupta be removed? You’ll recall that she made news back in March when her team at Oxford – long-standing rivals to Neil Ferguson’s team at Imperial College – published a preprint arguing that many more people could have been infected than we previously thought and herd immunity might be achievable without paying the price that Ferguson’s team claimed, i.e. 250,000+ Covid fatalities. At the time, this was summarised as “coronavirus may have infected half of UK population” – and widely scoffed at – but that isn’t what the paper said. Rather, it hypothesised a range of estimates, of which that was one.
In the interview, Gupta doesn’t defend the 50% figure, but stands by the idea that herd immunity can be achieved without hundreds of thousands of deaths:
In almost every context we’ve seen the epidemic grow, turn around and die away — almost like clockwork. Different countries have had different lockdown policies, and yet what we’ve observed is almost a uniform pattern of behaviour which is highly consistent with [our] model. To me that suggests that much of the driving force here was due to the build-up of immunity. I think that’s a more parsimonious explanation than one which requires in every country for lockdown (or various degrees of lockdown, including no lockdown) to have had the same effect.
She is careful not to directly criticise Ferguson and his team. Rather, the Government was at fault for acting as it did based on the team’s prediction:
The Government’s defence is that this [the Imperial College model] was a plausible worst case scenario. I agree it was a plausible — or at least a possible — worst case scenario. The question is, should we act on a possible worst case scenario, given the costs of lockdown? It seems to me that given that the costs of lockdown are mounting, that case is becoming more and more fragile.
In the most controversial section of the interview, Professor Gupta says she thinks the long-term harm caused by social distancing will outweigh the benefits. Why? Because protecting ourselves from exposure to pathogens in our day-to-day life makes us more vulnerable to killer viruses, not less.
Remaining in a state of lockdown is extremely dangerous from the point of view of the vulnerability of the entire population to new pathogens. Effectively we used to live in a state approximating lockdown 100 years ago, and that was what created the conditions for the Spanish Flu to come in and kill 50 million people.
Does that mean she’s in favour of dispensing with social distancing altogether and just returning to normal? She doesn’t quite say so, but that appears to be what she thinks.
I think it is very dangerous to talk about lockdown without recognising the enormous costs that it has on other vulnerable sectors in the population.
Great stuff, obviously, and history will almost certainly look more kindly on Professor Gupta than Professor Ferguson. But I’m not going to make her ‘Sceptic of the Week’ because, it turns out, she’s wary of being lumped in with libertarian types like me.
So I know there is a sort of libertarian argument for the release of lockdown, and I think it is unfortunate that those of us who feel we should think differently about lockdown have had our voices added to that libertarian harangue. But the truth is that lockdown is a luxury, and it’s a luxury that the middle classes are enjoying and higher income countries are enjoying at the expense of the poor, the vulnerable and less developed countries. It’s a very serious crisis.
Infection Fatality Rate is 0.26% – CDC
Regular readers will know that I’ve been tracking the infection fatality rate (IFR) throughout the crisis, convinced that it’s far lower than the 0.9% estimated by Neil Ferguson and way, way lower than the 3.4% estimated by the WHO. My prediction has long been that it will turn out to be slightly higher than the IFR of seasonal flu, which is 0.1% in an average year and 0.2% in a bad year. Although I’ve never been quite as bullish as Sunetra Gupta, who told Freddie she thinks it is somewhere between 0.1% and 0.01%.
On May 15th, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US published its official estimate – 0.26%, although it doesn’t come right out and say it. Rather, it estimates the case fatality rate (CFR) for different age groups:
- 0-49 year-olds: 0.05%
- 50-64 year-olds: 0.2%
- 65+ years-old: 1.3%
- Mean CFR: 0.4%
The CDC estimates that 35% of people who’ve been infected are asymptomatic, so to get the IFR from the CFR you have to multiply it by 0.65 – 0.4 x 0.65 = 0.26%.
Hats off to the Ethical Skeptic, the anonymous Twitter account which estimated the IFR at 0.26% more than two weeks ago. Using data from seroprevalence studies, he calculated that 32,768,000 Americans had been infected up to May 8th and divided that by the number of US fatalities, which was 86,469 at that point. That gave an IFR of 0.26%.
On May 15th, I discussed a New York Times article that criticised lockdown sceptics for circulating the Santa Clara serological study and highlighting its IFR estimate of 0.17%. According to the Times, the signal boost the study received from anti-lockdown wing-nuts on Twitter led to “a surge of misinformation”. Trouble is, that “misinformation” has turned out to be more accurate than the IFR estimates of the WHO and Professor Ferguson.
Incidentally, John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine at Harvard and the lead author of the Santa Clara study, has a new preprint out in which he estimates the IFR by looking at 12 seroprevalence studies in which the population sample size >500. His conclusion is that it’s “in the same ballpark as seasonal flu”, i.e. between 0.1% and 0.2%. Daniel Horowitz, a senior editor at the Conservative Review, says the mean IFR estimate based on these seroprevalence studies is 0.2%. “That is 17 times less deadly than what the WHO originally predicted and 4.5 times less deadly than the Imperial College study,” he writes.
So it’s official, folks: We’ve imprisoned over a billion people in their homes, laying waste to the global economy and causing untold misery and death in the process, to mitigate the impact of a virus that’s no deadlier than a bad bout of seasonal flu.
Did the New York Times Smear the German Anti-Lockdown Movement?
While we’re on the subject of “misinformation” pumped out by the New York Times, I asked my German-speaking correspondent to look into the Times‘s front-page story claiming the anti-lockdown movement in Germany is being manipulated by the AfD. This was his verdict:
The German media also treats the protest movement against lockdown restrictions in Germany as being driven by various fringe groups that are increasingly influenced by “the right” and AfD usually gets a mention. In a commentary on May 19th, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung describes the protests against lockdown restrictions literally as a “festival of delusional slogans”. The demos are described as colourful gatherings that attract all sorts of esoteric types, anti-vaxxers, left-wing extremists and anti-capitalists – and “increasing numbers of right-wingers”. The reporter Thomas Holl is bemused by the seeming contradictions at play – while international virologists and epidemiologists praise Merkel’s successful handling of the crisis and Germany’s relatively low death toll, there seems to be a stronger anti-lockdown protest movement in the country than elsewhere. Like the New York Times, Holl points the finger at AfD – the right-wing party’s showing in the polls dipped in April and the assertion is that they are looking to exploit the protests to recover lost ground.
I couldn’t see anything about AfD’s influence in Bild, but it carries an emotional story together with a video from the German network TV station ARD that pits a younger protestor against an older gentleman, Alfons Blum, who attended a protest in Gera. The pensioner is there because of how he has been personally affected – he has been unable to visit his wife who lives in a home for the past eight weeks and he breaks down in tears in the interview. A younger participant gets mixed up in how his emotional story is being exploited to distract from the bigger picture and starts shouting at Blum, citing earlier flu epidemics that claimed far more lives and that he should not allow the mainstream media to “make fun” of him on television. “If you listen to the network channels you will have practically lost control over your life!” he tells Blum. The commentary concludes by contrasting the two: “[C]itizens like pensioner Alfons Blum are suffering because of the measures – others believe that the media and the Government are being oppressive.”
Incidentally, there’s now a 7,000-word English summary of the leaked document written by the senior civil servant in the Ministry of the Interior. The translation is by Paul Gregory, a German-to-English translator.
More Praise for Governor DeSantis
USA Today ran a piece yesterday by opinion columnist Glenn Harlan Reynolds criticising New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and praising Florida Governor Ron DeSantis:
It’s interesting to compare Cuomo’s approach, in which infected (and infectious) patients were deliberately sent to nursing homes, with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s policy of protecting nursing homes first.
As the Palm Beach Post notes, DeSantis forbade the discharge of infected patients to nursing homes and long-term care facilities. As a result, only 3.5 per 100,000 nursing home residents in Florida contracted the disease, compared to 27 out of 100,000 in New York.
Thanks to Cuomo’s mishandling of the crisis “more than 5,300 nursing home patients in New York have died from COVID-19, and as an Albany Times Union account notes, critics blame this policy,” says Reynolds.
These mistakes led to a giant “Cuomo Killed My Mom” sign being erected off an overpass in upstate New York. Possibly unfair but certainly indicative of how some New Yorkers feel.
Round-Up
And on to the round-up of all the stories I’ve noticed, or which have been been brought to my attention, in the last 24 hours:
- ‘Do Lockdowns Work? Mounting Evidence Says No‘ – Good summary of the case by Ryan McMaken on the Mises Institute blog
- ‘Suicides on the rise amid stay-at-home order, Bay Area medical professionals say‘ – Report by Amy Hollyfield of ABC7 News. Includes this quote from Dr. Mike deBoisblanc, head of trauma at the John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek: “We’ve never seen numbers like this, in such a short period of time. I mean we’ve seen a year’s worth of suicide attempts in the last four weeks.”
- ‘Theatre stands on the brink of ruin‘ – West End producer Sonia Friedman says 70% of performing arts companies will close by Christmas if there is no government rescue package
- ‘Liberate London from lockdown now‘ – Brendan O’Neill with a good suggestion in the Spectator
- ‘Lockdowns are as contagious as Covid‘ – Paul Dolan, Professor of Behaviour Science at the LSE, tries to understand the mass hysteria that gripped governments around the world in March
- ‘How coronavirus and lockdown could make OCD more common in children‘ – A few days ago I published a comment by a psychiatric nurse pointing out the similarities between coronaphobia and OCD. This is now confirmed by Dr Bernadka Dubicka, Chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, who says there has been a surge in children and adolescents presenting with OCD
- ‘Universities battle to balance the books‘ – Article in the Times by Rosemary Bennett about the financial crisis facing Britain’s universities. The sector has asked the Treasury for a bailout of £2.2 billion, but to no avail
- ‘Lockdowns and Human Rights: A British Perspective‘ – The Australian blogger Richard Smith draws attention to how historically unprecedented the wholesale suspension of our liberties is
- ‘Britain is sliding into a deflationary death spiral‘ – The Telegraph‘s Jeremy Warner being his usual cheery self
Theme Tune Suggestions
Some more suggestions for theme songs from readers: “Trying to Survive” by Harvey Scales and the Seven Sounds, “The Whole Damn World is Going Crazy” by John Gary Williams and “Madness They Call It Madness” by Madness.
Small Businesses That Have Reopened
Last week, Lockdown Sceptics launched a searchable directory of open businesses across the UK. The idea is to celebrate those retail and hospitality businesses that have reopened, as well as help people find out what has opened in their area. But we need your help to build it, so we’ve created a form you can fill out to tell us about those businesses that have reopened near you. Please visit the page and let us know about those brave folk who are doing their bit to get our country back on its feet.
The list of shops and services that can reopen may be longer than people imagine. On May 13th, the Government issued revised guidance and it’s now permissible for the following retail businesses to reopen (this is in addition to those we already know about, such as garden centres and rubbish dumps):
- Dental services, opticians, audiology services, chiropody, chiropractors, osteopaths and other medical or health services (including physiotherapy and podiatry services), and services relating to mental health
- Bicycle shops
- Homeware, building supplies and hardware stores
- Veterinary surgeries and pet shops
- Agricultural supplies shops
- Off-licences and licensed shops selling alcohol, including those within breweries. Come on, Majestic. What are you waiting for?
- Laundrettes and dry cleaners
- Car repair and MOT services
Shameless Begging Bit
Thanks as always to those of you who made a donation in the last 24 hours to pay for the upkeep of this site. If you feel like donating please click here. And if you want to flag up any stories or links I should include in tomorrow’s update, email me here. The site’s total page views have now passed one million and it’s averaging 54,000 visitors a day. We’re making an impact!
And Finally…
It’s another shameless plug I’m afraid, this time for my latest column in Spectator USA. In this one, I blame China for unleashing this pandemic/panic on the world, although WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is a close second. My argument is that if the Chinese Communist authorities hadn’t silenced the Wuhan doctors who raised the alarm at the end of December, the virus might never have made it out of Wuhan:
Would the emergence of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan at the end of December have led to a global pandemic if the Chinese authorities had acted more quickly? Almost certainly not. A group of researchers at the University of Southampton looked at what difference it would have made if the travel ban and other non-pharmaceutical interventions had been put in place three weeks earlier, as soon as the doctors raised the alarm. They concluded that cases would have been reduced by 95 percent. In all likelihood, the virus would never have made it out of Hubei.
No doubt China will be judged to have mismanaged this crisis in a number of ways when the official inquiries get under way. There are already a flurry of lawsuits seeking compensation from the Chinese government, including one launched by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who claims the state has suffered tens of billions of dollars in economic losses as a result of China’s negligence.
But perhaps China’s biggest sin was to stop those Wuhan doctors exercising their right to free speech. Had they been allowed to raise their concerns in the public arena, instead of being silenced and publicly shamed, it’s likely that hundreds of thousands of people across the world would now still be alive. At the time of writing, there have been 4.1 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 283,000 deaths from the disease.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
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The media doesn’t seem very interested this morning in whatever happened in Bath yesterday (“suspected chemical attack”)
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/local-news/people-stripped-hosed-down-amid-9445215
No description appears to be given of the woman with the bag, who appears not to have been detained. Is this person a risk to other members of the public?
Monday morning Sandhurst Rd & Finchampstead Rd Wokingham
An Israeli minister amongst the mob.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/sde-teiman-israeli-soldiers-under-arrest-raping-palestinian-prisoner
Nine Israeli soldiers in the notorious Sde Teiman detention centre were arrested on Monday on suspicion of raping a Palestinian detainee …
Amazing, I do not believe it. Has law and order returned? Not possible.
“Police were called to a popular beauty spot in the Peak District after a fight broke out between several people wielding large sticks, reports LBC.”
It’s fairly clear from the footage that efforts to bring more “diversity” to the countryside are bearing fruit.
Just watched the footage. FFS. It’s difficult to draw any other conclusion than we’re being invaded by an enemy that’s not civilised enough to share a small stretch of river, but who are motivated enough to destroy, from the inside out, the country that welcomed them and gave them a home. An incredibly dangerous mix.
Not a scintilla of self-awareness as to the possible cause of the much trumpeted ‘racism’ of the countryside…
Very clear tof.
I suppose it was fortunate for all that the stick-wielding thugs didn’t have knives or machetes.
There’s always a next time!
One crucially important fact few people are aware of:
The reason Muslims, in particular, feel entitled to take over peaceful areas of outstanding natural beauty in the West is that Islam teaches that simply reading a passage from the Koran aloud in any place claims that place as part of the territory of the Global Caliphate, forever.
That’s why they do things like go to the rim of the Grand Canyon, for example, and read passages from the Koran aloud.
You can be sure they have been quietly doing the same all over Britain and the West.
And that’s why they feel entitled to be as rude, arrogant, and even violent towards any non-Muslim in any place that they have thus claimed, be it a church or government building like the British Parliament, or in the great outdoors.
That’s also why they insist on “prayer rooms” being set aside for them, and why composer Karl Jenkins sneaked the horrible caterwauling Muslim Call to Prayer into his musical composition entitled “The Armed Man”, sometimes performed in churches.
Net-zero and CBDC at once. What can possibly go wrong?
I don’t know about the rest of you, but every morning, I wake up wondering what today’s piece of earth-shattering news is going to be. I note also that the massive story from a day or two ago is no longer being forefronted by the MSM. This would explain a lot!
https://futurism.com/the-byte/former-nasa-scientist-experiment-live-in-simulation
Alternatively, Hermetic philosophy has it that the universe is a mental construct in an infinite mind which would also explain a lot.
“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”
That was the stark statement from Rachel Reeves, her cuts included;
Rachel Reeves has scrapped some winter fuel payments, along with a raft of other government programmes and policies to plug a projected government overspend of £22bn.
The chancellor said those not in receipt of pension credit will no longer receive the extra money as she repeatedly told MPs: “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”
The chancellor also announced that adult social care charging reforms, which had been delayed by the previous government, would also not go forward on the new government’s watch – in a move that will save more than £1bn by the end of next year.
Road scheme cancellations
Two road schemes have definitely been scrapped – a planned two-mile tunnel for the A303 under Stonehenge, and work on the A27, including a Chichester bypass. This, as well as not reopening old rail lines under the Restoring Your Railway programme, will save nothing this year but nearly £800m next.
If she really means her “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.” then I would say that should include Ed Miliband and his net-zero GB Energy nonsense.
Interestingly the A303 tunnel at Stonehenge was planned to relieve the holiday traffic jams that occur at that spot as people head down to the west country for a holiday. Maybe this is a tacit admission that under Milibands net-zero plans for EVs, in a few years time most people will not have a car and therefore cannot head down the A303 and cause traffic jams.
The decision to scrap social care charging reforms will ensure that more people will have to cash in the value of their homes to pay for end of life care, so not only will we not have a car we will have no property either! A brave new world indeed!
And similarly with the decision not to re-open old railway lines, the population is to be ghettoed in 15 minute cities so there will be no need for these lines.
Social care charging is simply theft of property which is behind much of what is happening these days and on which I have commented often.
Still, there is sufficient to fund a 22% wage rise for doctors we never see, inflation busting rises for teachers and other public sector workers who apparently are even less productive than pre C1984, so it’s not all bad then.
This agenda is blatantly not the Labour Party’s because they haven’t got the intelligence for all this, it is straight from the WEF and delivered via T. Bliar.
Re the A303 project, some will be content that it’s been shelved for the long term, given the legal battle against it, e.g. https://stonehengealliance.org.uk/a303-stonehenge-what-is-the-latest-position/ I’ve got no interest in that, just aware of it.
Another project that seems to be on the shelf that was reported by the local news outlet was the redevelopment of the Portishead branch near Bristol: https://www.portisheadrailwaygroup.org/history.html
“If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it.”
It depends on what “it” is.
“New Defence Secretary pledges to step up support for Ukraine on visit to Odesa”
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-defence-secretary-pledges-to-step-up-support-for-ukraine-on-visit-to-odesa
Has anyone else noticed there seems to have been a sudden decrease in the amount of uptick/downtick votes in general on the DS?
I think the requirement to login in order to vote has hurt the site a bit. Makes it look far less active for one thing, but also removes a bit of interaction from “the other side”. I used to like getting the red marks from the floppy lot lol.
Nah, I have to disagree. I think actual dialogue should be encouraged and getting a gazillion red or green numbers under your post isn’t the way. It’s just petty and manipulative. It should have no influence but maybe some people would be less keen to share a point of view if they thought they’d get a pile-on from faceless people and not a single actual reply. That was what pissed me off, and I’ve much experience. I’d get about 50 red numbers and I’d be lucky to get a single person respond as to why they disagree with me. That’s when you know it’s all saddos sat at home with no accounts, and presumably no lives or Netflix sub either. In my opinion, if you’re gonna be a hater at least have the bollocks to be a hater with a response and engage in discourse.
With you Mogs.
I can see both sides of the coin. I preferred it before though.
Yes, it’s rude to downvote a comment and not say why…
Plenty of people did ( and still do. Example above ) it out of spite and pettiness though. Plus they get their kicks if you show your irritation because all they want is to get a rise out of you, which is beyond pathetic. But I know exactly who my haters are on here anyway and I’ll either ignore or call them out on their bullshit, depending on what mood I’m in. One common trait they share is an inability to take a dose of their own medicine.
Seconded
Nonsense! Have you seen the thousands of commenters on Daily Mail articles? Some comments get tens of thousands of upvotes or downvotes! What would their website be like if everyone who downticked a comment had to give an explanation, as well as another explanation of why they upticked others? It would take up a huge amount of space on their website, for a start, and for what?
No one has to say why they upvote comments, or downvote comments, or click the Like or Dislike buttons on Youtube videos— the whole idea is ridiculous, and paranoid.
If they feel like giving further explanations, they can choose to give them OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL, not be forced by some Stalinist Paranoid.
If you don’t care, why provide such a detailed response?
How do you know who is down-ticking? Does DS give you that information?
DHJ, you have unknowingly hit the nail on the head!
Judging from Mogwai’s comments in the past, it seems she does have access to information about all the commenters here, which is how she was able to suddenly “out” one commenter, stating his real name as a researcher whose book famously challenged the Islamic Invasion of the West, and thereby violating his right to privacy and anonymity as a paying DS member, and possibly even endangering his life.
It seems Mogwai is masquerading on here as a member of the public, when she is actually either on the DS staff, or in a special “relationship” with one of the editors, thereby deceiving all the other DS commenters while invading their right to privacy and anonymity.
Thanks, this is very strange as the Mogwai comment has gone.
I’m fairly certain I responded to that comment and not yours but when comments have been removed in the past, the whole branch of responses goes with it (which would be correct).
My comment now shows in response to yours, which is misleading.
It doesn’t matter. You were right to suspect Mogwai had some private inside information on all the commenters, while she masquerades as a member of the public.
Yes that would be bad in itself but the comments do also matter. If I did respond to that comment and it was deleted, my response should also be removed, not associated with another comment.
That could happen anywhere on the site such that historic discussions look very different and who would know until someone then decides to de-anonymise users and use the modified version of the discussion against them.
It looks like I responded to Heretic but I didn’t.
What happened to the Mogwai comment on how they don’t care about downticks etc.?
and there the comment is, magically back again.
Edit: my mistake, that’s a new one on a similar theme.
It’s just happened again. The Mogwai comment was removed and my comment is now out of context.
But I took a copy this time (see attached). So now it’s evidenced that DS either has poor comments management or is intentionally manipulating the discussion.
Hardliner is offended by the word, “shitmuncher” but not “pissed”, apparently!
I agree 100%. There are so many interesting websites, all asking for subscriptions, it is just not feasible to satisfy them all but it makes a site interesting if you can still express an opinion, even if it is only a thumbs up or down. DS will know but I would expect general readership of this website to decline over time which is not a good thing.
But people without accounts can still read all the comments plus most of the articles, so what meaningful difference does it make? I’ve noticed a few new usernames crop up on here of late so it could actually have the opposite effect and motivate people to finally get an account so that they can join in properly, as opposed to being mere voyeurs, sitting on the sidelines, contributing nothing but a silly thumbs up/down, as if we regulars are nothing more than characters to be influenced and manipulated on a video game. Personally, I don’t need a boatload of little green numbers to give me positive feedback and galvanize me to comment further, by the same token loads of little red numbers don’t put me off either. The whole thing is just very childish and irrelevant, to my mind. I’m afraid clicking on a little thumb does not ”express an opinion”, but typing and sharing actual words does.
Exactly.
The other side of this, is found at the Spectator, where opening comments to App users has resulted in an avalanche of nonsense and a system where one is unlikely to ever find one’s own comment, buried among hundreds of others, nor ever know if anyone has replied or ‘voted’.
I think it is because you have to be logged in to vote.
A couple of weeks ago the site settings were changed so you need to be a subscriber to vote, is my understanding. Sadly I think very few people subscribe – my guess is we’re in the 100s.
No, it’s because every subscriber’s vote on any comment can now be scrutinised by the DS staff, removing the Freedom of Anonymity and Opinion, so subscribers are more hesitant to vote at all.
This new system was installed because people like yourself constantly complained about getting even one measly downvote, even though you got loads of upvotes.
You lot wanted everyone to be hunted down and forced to explain why they downvoted anyone, so it’s no fun at all anymore.
My “complaints” were an attempt to stimulate a response and certainly not intended to change site policy. I want people to disagree here, but say why – I think it’s helpful.
It’s Stalinist and Paranoid.
You have removed everyone’s Freedom of Choice.
Well I don’t make the site rules and I certainly wouldn’t want to have much if any influence over them – that is a matter for those who run the site. I can’t get excited about the “voting” buttons one way or the other. Broadly speaking I am in favour of whatever brings more people to the site and gets more people commenting and subscribing.
You constantly complained about it, every single time anyone dared to give you even one downvote, and others joined you in those complaints, demanding downvoters be “Hunted Down and Forced to Explain”.
The DS editors were responding to all your complaints, and yet now you are still complaining, as if it was nothing to do with your complaints at all.
I demanded no such thing, and the DS editors are free to do whatever they choose to do, and I am certainly not responsible for their choices.
You demanded it of downvoters every time, not of the DS editors, but the editors responded to the constant complaints of yourself and others such as Mogwai and Huxley.
If you disagree the discussion may be modified such that you are then disagreeing with something else. This sort of modification has been happening further up this comments section.
The Mogwai account has had their comments cherry-picked from the discussion while all else remains but now out of context. Added to Heretic’s concerns, it all seems a bit suspicious and untrustworthy.
At least some of the accounts, yourself included, I took as genuine.
There is an edit function on comments, but I think you’d have to be pretty quick to get in before an edit because it’s time-limited.
I am not aware of comments being deleted – the original posters can flag that up if it’s happening.
I am genuine, though I cannot prove it (but at least one person on the Lockdown Sceptics subreddit has met me in real life, so you could ask there if I am a bot).
My gut feel is that the mods and people who run this site do their best, have genuine motivations, are a pretty open book, and are not worthy of too much suspicion.
Here’s an example of comments being selectively deleted.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/07/30/news-round-up-1235/#comment-970628
Discussions have previously been truncated when a parent comment was removed. This happened in a discussion we had which was then re-instated after I raised it.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/03/04/the-dangers-of-banning-islamophobia/#comment-939748
I can cope with some bots, paid-for influencers and those harvesting information for Other Reasons but not when it looks like it could be in collusion with the site owners or when the site owners have dubious data management that can misrepresent what was said. All the worse for being on a site promoting free speech.
The first example you give I imagine was deleted as it was seen as an overly personal attack – I don’t have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I think pages and pages of name calling just makes a comments section tedious so it should be discouraged, but if it only happens occasionally I don’t see the harm in leaving them in.
The second example I don’t remember we ever got to the bottom of – I guess something went beyond a red line. Again I don’t think it happens often and on the whole I think these sections work well – just not enough people!
Erm, ”overly personal attack”?? It’s called a retaliation to somebody who’s ensured my previous post got erased due to them not being able to take a dose of their own medicine. This is what happens when you have the same person trolling you around the comments sections, leaving nasty, snarky little comments, making up blatant bullshit about you, trying to turn other posters against you and they apparently resent it when you turn the tables and give them it back with interest.
That’s what that is!
I would not have deleted it personally
It’s why I keep banging on about freedom of speech being just an illusion and how the goalposts seem to be continually moving, at least on this site, so nobody knows exactly what the parameters are and what they can safely say. But the troll can keep on trolling and carry on being defamationtastic, so it’s all good. Just so long as there’s no rudy words, right?
I’ll always be brash and they’ll have to kick me off this site because I’m not changing who I am for anyone. Nobody’s forcing anyone to read my posts, so to pot with them.
So come get me, Gestapo boy!
I don’t think you will be or should be kicked off!
I think this site does OK – better than many.
Cheers, tof. Though I won’t take it personally seeing as you’re an absolutist so you would say that!
That previously deleted discussion “may have been done in error”.
When a comment is removed and the responses are then associated with the parent comment, that’s a false representation of the discussion that took place.
The removed comment could be marked as “Deleted” (or “Censored” – accurate but not a good look), as readers can then see that responses were originally to another comment.
Commenters could be given the option to delete their own comment. I think it’s fine for people to retract their own comment but not for it to be censored by the site.
Yes mine were removed and I’ve emailed the DS team over it as I’d like some rationale for them doing so. Well, I say ”them”, but it’s obvious that, once again, Hardliner has me in his crosshairs, but that’d be because the one-man toxic clown show that calls himself ‘Heretic’ snitched like a weeny crybaby, because his precious ”freedom of speech” only works one way, you see. He gets to leave me the usual snarky, rude comments but I apparently have no right of reply. That’s how his warped version of ‘free speech’ works. Hypocrisy off the charts.
Well, Hardliner doesn’t need much encouragement to stick his Gestapo oar in, let’s be honest. He’s got significant form. Ain’t that right, Mr Watcher? LOL Expect this post to self-destruct in 3, 2, 1….
But I am loving how I’m now apparently a double-agent, mole, shacked up with a DS team member….OMFG…the fantasy world of the resident whack job never ends! LMFAO Totally libelous but then I’m not a two-faced hypocrite whingebag that bleats on tediously about ”freedom of Speech” then tries to police everybody else’s, so I let it slide..
That’s because the vast majority of people ( who weren’t bots ) who used this function didn’t have accounts, so now they’re out of the picture and can’t ‘vote’, and those of us with accounts aren’t so invested or easily manipulated into using a pointless and inconsequential function.
Many times I’ll like someone’s comment but I don’t actually ‘like’ it, because I refuse to play along, IYKWIM. Can you see little red/green numbers making one iota of difference to anybody’s posting? Because I can’t.
That’s ok then chaps, I thought people were leaving in droves!
I do agree you should be a member to vote it just looked odd that once popular comments dropped from the 200s to the 10s
It’s because members’ every vote is now exposed to be marked and analysed by the DS staff, if they choose to do so. It removed all Freedom of Anonymity in voting, since the DS staff can now trace all your voting patterns directly back to your home.
All because a few people whined about getting even one downvote!
This new system actually removed Freedom of Speech and Opinion.
The system seems to be suffering from bugs…
I have to log in twice, as my attempt is always rejected on the first go and accepted on the second, and then I can comment myself, but not up/down tick others comments.
it’s a bit tiresome but it has caused me to muse on why we seek validation of our outpourings from people we’ll likely never know?
Precisely! “Why do we seek validation of our outpourings from people we’ll likely never know?”
And why should we be upset if they do not validate our outpourings, like anxious teenagers?
“Brawl between stick-wielding walkers erupts at Peak District beauty spot”
Apparently the countryside is racist!
Take a close look at the demographics involved in this dovedale brawl, I’ve visited the place many times and never witnessed behaviour like this!
Maybe they are fighting for the right of the most viable demographic to represent minorities in the countryside?!
“Just stop oil….” There was a clip of that on GBN yesterday. At the time it occurred to me that one of the culprits might have something heavy accidentally dropped on them, or perhaps accidentally kicked in the head, given where they were sitting in the queue.
..Or some big red throbbing fingers! “Oops, sorry mate, did I step on you?”
https://x.com/stevenjonmiller/status/1817636026489217375?s=46&t=R21CfODPbaIEdqga4ocKHw
Report from LBC on Saturday’s Freedom Rally – he’s bob on.
Yes, bang on
I saw that TR had his collar felt after screening his film at the rally… terrorism, apparently?
Anyway, I thought I’d take a gander at this banned film, to see what the fuss was about… I’m still not at all sure.
Either it’s all lies, which should be easy enough to refute or, it’s true in which case there should be an inquiry as to just what is going on?
At the end, I was reminded of the proper investigative work that the BBC used to do and programmes like Panorama, when they cared.
I know we’re supposed to hate him but, on the basis of the film, I’m not sure why. He raises serious question, in my opinion, that need answers.
By the way, the registration number on the Merc sitting outside his house, really doesn’t exist…
It’s terrible that he has reportedly been forced to flee his own ancestral homeland of Britain to avoid being thrown into prison yet again by a vindictive judiciary, this time the Relentless Emily Thornberry hunting him down, as he pointed out.
Who can blame the poor lad from fleeing, after the Muslim/Marxist B*s tards nearly starved him to death last time?
It’s horrific, reminding the world of how the Brazilian Patriot Jair Bolsonaro and the Russian Patriot Alexei Navalny were ruthlessly hunted down.
And the honest, noble-hearted Dr. Andrew Wakefield was hunted down and driven out of his own ancestral homeland, for warning the world about the dangers of childhood vaccines causing neurological damage…
Sally Beck at TCW with a report into the grotesque failures of the NHS in looking after women who are pregnant and ready to give birth.
Uncomfortable reading.
Population reduction?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/maternity-in-crisis-things-have-never-been-so-bad/
“Brawl between stick-wielding walkers erupts at Peak District beauty spot”
One look at the accompanying video will show that these are not Ethnic Europeans. Here are some great DM comments from the public:
—“We visited there last year as we had heard it was a beauty spot. We walk a long way to get there only to see people of a certain minority completely monopolizing the whole area. There were people sitting on chairs eating in the river and many huge family groups eating everywhere. we felt very outnumbered and uncomfortable and left very quickly. Such a shame the beauty was lost.”
—“It was the same on Hornsea beach recently. I felt out of place.”
—“We went to Bidury trout farm in the Cotswolds couple of weeks ago exactly the same….we paid to go in then left ten minutes later.”
—“I have never seen a fight breakout before at beauty spots like this – their behaviour is an utter disgrace.”
—“Then you look at the picture and see why!! It’s our replacements as always, I have been there loads of times and it’s the most peaceful place going, when I saw fighting with sticks I thought this sounds a bit weird… Then you see why.”
—“Ah, Liblabcon’s Enrichment programme. Cultural dissolution.”
—“It looks a bit like Manchester airport without the police.”
—“I had fond childhood memories of the Dovedale stepping stones and took my grandson there last summer. I was shocked to find large family groups everywhere, cooking food, playing loud music and littering. The place has been ruined.”
—“And where do you suppose they all relieve themselves, since there are no toilet facilities?”
—“I was there for the first and only time three years ago. I could see it was a magnet for Derby’s ‘finest’ citizens. There would be no point in reporting them, those airport scenes show what might be the reception some poorly paid outdoor ranger would get.”
—“This will just be two families. They pack into SUVs and minibuses and arrive in number. One from the M persuasion and other H. They brought their old grievances over from the old country and it’s just surprising it doesn’t kick off more often.”
—“You’re so right, I am seeing that much more often at these sorts of places. Huge groups of people babbling noisily in the middle of the peaceful national parks making a right ruckus. When you get down to the carpark there’s a minibus/large SUV waiting for them all and they all pile in.”
—“Try visiting Canada.”
—“YES!! We visited the Canadian Rockies this year & couldn’t believe then number of them. Hogging the photo spots, loudly, in large groups trying to get the right selfie.”
—“I said before in another story about where they want to buy a Scottish Island and convert it. This group of people are in the news every single day for something like this. They are totally barbaric and do not belong here.”
—“The Scottish Highlands too, the men are very rude and arrogant to locals.”
—“This thread is the last bastion. The Torygraph is too chicken to allow [free speech].”
—“My Scots parents brought our family to live in Australia long ago, and for a long time we used to refer to Britain as “home.” I’ve been back to visit and work maybe ten times during my life, but I’ve got to ask — who are these people? Where have they come from? What kind of behaviour is this?”
—“We took our children for a walk there and to show them the giant stones we would visit as children. It was shocking when we walked into the area. No longer calm and peaceful. It was over run heaving, tents up families cooking in giant pans. Hammocks in trees even a few families playing cricket (not exactly safe with so many people close by) the stones were totally blocked people just stood on them not moving, not letting people get across. Pushing and shoving it was shocking we were one of very few white people. Definitely won’t be visiting again the craziness of it all was very off putting felt like I was at a festival.”
Stockport ?? Anyone ???
Good point (you mean Southport?). I think one of the commenters did a post on it promptly yesterday.
It seems the Rwandan Muslim Terrorist Filth may have been radicalised by the Southport Mosque into stabbing the Southport children for the same reason that the British Army officer and the British prison officer were stabbed earlier:
Revenge for the conviction of Pakistani Muslim Terrorist Filth Anjem Choudary.
Yes Southport sorry all ! This is what I thought – Choudrys last acts before he went down !
Well done to you for your perspicacity, because not many other people have made that connection!
Notice how the police have rushed to claim it was not a terrorist attack, and will no doubt shortly be trotting out the Bog-Standard Mental Health Excuse.
Judging from Mogwai’s comments in the past, it seems she does have access to information about all the commenters here, which is how she was able to suddenly “out” one commenter, stating his real name as a researcher whose book famously challenged the Islamic Invasion of the West, and thereby violating his right to privacy and anonymity as a paying DS member, and possibly even endangering his life.
It seems Mogwai is masquerading on here as a member of the public, when she is actually either on the DS staff, or in a special “relationship” with one of the editors, thereby deceiving all the other DS commenters while invading their right to privacy and anonymity.
The recent coverage of the stabbings in Southport reminded me of an incident that happened relatively close to my area some years ago. Alright, the age group was different, but it transpired that the culprit that killed someone on the way home from work late at night was found guilty of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, being a paranoid schizophrenic. He was detained indefinitely in Broadmoor as a result of the trial. However, soon after the offence, there was a lot of “something must be done” output from the usual sources, even to the extent of draconian proposals for certain footpath closures etc.
Of course, we don’t know yet, but the output from the MSM is quite familiar, and it may be that some senior politicians have over reacted. Seen any of that recently?