UK Politics General Discussion

[Matt N]

I cannot believe I'm giving air to this.

The 15 minute city conspiracy theory is that you will not be able to travel more than 15 minutes from your home. Car travel will be banned, you will be concentrated and contained to your 15 minute city and that will be it.

Needless to say it's utter horse ****.

It is based on a misunderstanding, either willing or inadvertent, on the principles of good urban design.

Apologies… I didn’t mean to anger you.

I was only seeking clarification because to me, a 15 minute city just sounds like clever and helpful urban planning, and I was baffled as to why the idea angered people so much.

I could be missing something, but to me, that theory makes little sense! Why would trains and buses still run to further-flung places if they didn’t want you to travel more than 15 minutes from your home?

 

[GooseOnTheLoose]

Why would trains and buses still run to further-flung places if they didn’t want you to travel more than 15 minutes from your home?

They wouldn't. You would be consigned to your 15 minute city and would never be able to leave it, neither would anyone else.... It's one sure fire way to solve the immigration "problem".

This is an inconvenience too far for the conspiracy theorists however. They only want to restrict other people's ability to freely move around, not their own.

 

[Matt N]

They wouldn't. You would be consigned to your 15 minute city and would never be able to leave it, neither would anyone else.... It's one sure fire way to solve the immigration "problem".

This is an inconvenience too far for the conspiracy theorists however. They only want to restrict other people's ability to freely move around, not their own.

In my humble opinion, that theory is ludicrous. When so much of the economy is derived from various forms of transport (e.g. planes, trains, cars, buses), why on Earth would the government benefit from or want to restrict movement?

 

[AT86]

In my humble opinion, that theory is ludicrous. When so much of the economy is derived from various forms of transport (e.g. planes, trains, cars, buses), why on Earth would the government benefit from or want to restrict movement?

Quite obviously they wouldn’t.

But don’t let common sense or facts get in the way of a nut job conspiracy theory.

 

[Dave]

Conspiracy theories are nearly always designed to scare people into believing something really bad so they ignore the bad thing the people pushing the conspiracy are actually doing.

Immigration fear has its modern roots in the “great replacement theory” conspiracy. Right wing authoritarians push it because they want rid of human rights laws. The idea is you persuade people that human rights laws are letting bad people into your country so you cheer as they get rid of the human rights, and it’s too late when you notice the actual target of these people was you not the immigrant.

 

[Matt N]

My personal outlook with conspiracy theories, and a lot of things really, is to try and use Occam’s Razor when determining what to believe. Go with the simplest theory that requires the least assumptions, as this is most likely to be true.

If you think about it, many of these conspiracy theories do not hold muster with Occam’s Razor, as they require a lot of wild assumptions!

In reality, most people are good people who are not out to get you. I’m not saying there aren’t some bad eggs and things to be vigilant about, but living your life in paranoia about conspiracies that aren’t proven to be true must achieve little other than making you miserable and scared.

 

[East Coast Mariner]

1) You said lethal batches, your links are studies showing differing levels of adverse incidents based on batch numbers of the same drug, the study abstract doesn’t mention deaths. It’s not unheard of for bad batches to occur in all medicines, i work in healthcare and we get recalls of batches of all drugs and when we report an Adverse incident we send the batch number to the MHRA. That’s not a lethal batch, it’s differing incident rates usually indicative of a manufacturing issue rather than an issue with the drug itself. If anything it proves the vaccine itself is likely fine, but that there was a manufacturing issue rather than anything inherently wrong with the vaccine.

A recent Japanese study by Dr Yasufumi Murakami has proven beyond doubt they are lethal. And injecting this substance was a condition of using the "vaccine passport" (ie. a prototype digital ID), that's the point. Now, you can say we weren't "forced" as much as you like, but anyone who can defend it at all, I'd suggest their morals are in the gutter.

 

[rob666]

The Vigilant Fox website...that well known and listed spreader of false conspiracy theories and misinformation...
Source...wikipedia.
Tinfoil hat and beyond.

 

[Matt N]

A recent Japanese study by Dr Yasufumi Murakami has proven beyond doubt they are lethal. And injecting this substance was a condition of using the "vaccine passport" (ie. a prototype digital ID), that's the point. Now, you can say we weren't "forced" as much as you like, but anyone who can defend it at all, I'd suggest their morals are in the gutter.

I’d be asking a number of questions about that study.

For instance, were the vaccinated and unvaccinated samples equal in terms of demographics? Were they both representative of the population at large? Were they encouraged to socialise in the same way? Was the paper peer reviewed by respected academics?

Many, many variables could influence these conclusions, and it’s dangerous to automatically trust a conclusion just because it comes from someone with a title or because the internet says it.

If we go back a few years, an academic with a title concluded that the MMR vaccine irrefutably caused autism. This paper was published in The Lancet, a respected medical journal. That man’s name was Dr Andrew Wakefield, and it was later found that he skewed his results due to having vested interests in a company providing autism diagnoses. Wakefield was struck off the medical register and the paper was redacted as a result.

That’s not to cast doubt on academics at all, but I’m more trying to prove that you can’t just trust any old journal article by any old academic. You need to scrutinise research and make sure that it’s peer reviewed and follows rigorous academic process.

The COVID vaccine research certainly did follow these processes, despite calls to the contrary. While there were unfortunate side effects in a small number of edge cases, the greater good attained by COVID vaccination in terms of driving down disease spread and allowing us to unlock normality outweighed those considerably.

If it was “lethal” to any significant number of people, the COVID vaccine would not have been approved. The government does not want to kill its citizens or cause us harm; even if you do believe that they don’t care about us, mass death is not in the government’s interest as it vastly reduces the tax take and vastly increases the strain on health services!

 

[Matt N]

Apologies for double posting, but having looked a little further into the study cited above, I found that it was found to have a key methodology flaw:

Additionally, the Japanese study cited in sensationalist claims (often linked to a Cureus journal article or other sources) has been criticized for methodological flaws. For instance, a fact-check by AFP notes that the Cureus study, which examined deaths within 10 days of Pfizer vaccination, relied on a passive reporting system where clinicians only report adverse events they suspect are vaccine-related. This system biases toward reporting sudden deaths shortly after vaccination, which does not prove causation. Experts like Takahiro Kinoshita emphasized that such studies do not show a higher risk of death post-vaccination compared to later periods.

If you only use a system of self-reporting, of course you will get a greater number of deaths among vaccinated individuals than is the case in reality!

Source:

 

[Dave]

A recent Japanese study by Dr Yasufumi Murakami has proven beyond doubt they are lethal. And injecting this substance was a condition of using the "vaccine passport" (ie. a prototype digital ID), that's the point. Now, you can say we weren't "forced" as much as you like, but anyone who can defend it at all, I'd suggest their morals are in the gutter.

So you have linked to a conspiracy theory website.

The study referenced has not been published in a peer reviewed journal.

The scientific method has a basic set of steps:

1) Have an idea (hypothesis),
2) design a test to prove it.
3) Run the test.
4) analyse your results.
5) Publish your results in a peer review journal so other scientists can scrutinise your results and repeat your test if they want to check your conclusion.

The main criticism of his article is he didn’t do very good analysis and didn’t factor in age related factors (ie he assumed a 25 year old and a 75 year old had the same risk of death and the same dosing schedule as each other).

And before the tinfoil hat comes out, there are hundreds of peer review journals, and millions of scientists, the idea all of them are part of some giant conspiracy is just not happening.

So yeah give me peer reviewed evidence not some tin foil hat BS. As an FYI the paper you quoted in an earlier post had been peer reviewed you just extrapolated a conclusion that didn’t exist in it.

As an aside I don’t blame anyone not understanding the scientific method as the media misrepresent it all the time (the usual articles saying “scientists now say X”), fact is people will do good work and publish it thinking they have an answer but when the wider scientific community look at it they find errors. Science is mostly iterative, it’s rare you get a one shot idea like Einsteins general relativity, especially these days.

There are 500 articles saying vaccines work and are safe for every 1 that says they don’t and are dangerous.

 

[BarryZola]

I actually still want to know if there has been a proper investigation into the money spent on the Covid app and the businesses who benefited from the PPE contracts during Covid. I've heard about the Michelle Mone thing but that's about all I've heard. The last I heard, several years ago, is that people were being paid thousands of pounds an hour to consult on that pathetic failed covid app, which ended up costing hundreds of millions or more. What's going on? It seemed like the biggest transfer of tax payer money into private croney pockets in at least a generation, but it's never mentioned.

 

[rob666]

...As for the other points in this quote, you are quite simply wrong. Numerous independent scientists have confirmed bad batches. Look at the Danish and Swedish studies for one thing, ...

OK, have done this one first.
From reading the actual words in the abstract, they have stated nothing at all about confirming bad batches from my understanding, they are talking regarding occasional adverse reactions to the vaccine being slightly variable with each batch, but not between each vaccine in each batch...some batches have slighly more adverse reactions than others...not bad batches at all...quality control was always high.
And the extract explains clearly that the generalization of the finding has not been established largescale.
The collation of evidence regarding covid vaccines was quite clear in the meta research, less heavy suffering and death if you got vaccinated, more heavy suffering and death if you didn't...but that was always a freedom of choice for the individual.
No mention of bad batches whatsoever, sorry, in the research paper you quote...just slightly variable rates of a minor adverse response to the vaccination.
What they say is, the vaccine itself varied over time...and there were occasional adverse reactions...nothing that we didn't know already.
And of course, that is one minor report out of several thousand, but we can all be selective in our studies to find an appropriate set of numbers.
...and I couldn't find anything meaningful on your Spanish scientists reference regarding their "Quinta Columnas"...or fifth columnists.

 

[jon81uk]

Ugh, "15 minute city" conspiracy theories. I live in what could be described as a 15min city - I can walk to the shops, station, doctor, dentist, library, etc. There's a park one street over. Some of the Victorian streets are closed off to vehicles at one end in what would now be called low traffic neighbourhoods but it was done half a century ago because even back then people realised that having commuters cutting through residential areas is obviously a bad thing.

All in all, it's just a great place to live. The alternative is US-style endless suburban sprawl where you pretty much HAVE to drive if you want to leave your house and results in miles and miles of soulless retail parks lining 6 lane roads.

Yep I love that I’ve barely used the car in the last few weeks, I am 12 minutes walk to a full size Sainsbury’s, 15 to the doctor and dentist, 15 minutes to our town centre shops and multiple pubs.
Don’t like all the new estates without even a corner shop on them.

 

[Matt N]

In my personal opinion, the fact that we didn’t see mass death as a result of the COVID vaccine is evidence enough that it wasn’t “lethal”.

Yes, I don’t deny that there were adverse reactions in a small number of edge cases. And yes, a small number of those people did die. It is true that some people are resistant to vaccines and are prone to adverse reactions. Vaccines do not come without a small amount of risk; very few things in life do.

But you know what far more people had adverse reactions to and died from? Raw, unadulterated COVID infection.

The pandemic is confirmed to have caused millions of deaths and serious illnesses worldwide (Worldometers estimates that over 7 million worldwide died from COVID infection, which would be a death rate of around 1%: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/), whereas the US Congress stated that the rate of death after a COVID vaccine was 0.0021%, and even this is thought to be an overestimate due to the role of the vaccine in some reported deaths being unknown and there being inadequate evidence to suggest that the vaccine directly caused the death: https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/117456/documents/HHRG-118-JU05-20240626-SD011.pdf

So if you look at it like that, the death rate following the vaccine is at most 0.2% of that of COVID. Yes, any death that occurs is terrible, but if you think about it from a calculated risk standpoint, the vaccines are overall vastly reducing deaths. If the death rate from the vaccine is 0.2% of that of COVID infection, and only 0.0021% overall, that is such a microscopic percentage that the calculated risk must surely be worth it compared to a 1% death rate for COVID infection?

 

[pluk]

Nearly all medical intervention is an odds game. I thought this was common knowledge and blindingly obvious, but apparently not!

You have an issue, from a pandemic to an unidentified lump to a dodgy hip to a cold, and you have options to manage the risk of death or level of discomfort that each brings.

Some people have a bad reaction to a jab, some don't wake up from the anesthetic for their exploratory or routine op, and have a look at the possible side effects list on your lemsip! Every action has a risk.

Anyone pointing at the small number of jab related deaths against the mountin caused by covid, or thinking their odds are better without the jab rather than with it, are only showing the world their lack of intelligence and understanding.

 

[Benzin]

Everyone who has had a vaccination has died.

But so has everyone who hasn't.


We're through the looking glass here people.

 

[rob666]

Only because life in general is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.

 

[BarryZola]

Well well well, if it isn't our own housing minister not paying the appropriate tax on her own housing purchase.

But, for good measure, let's push the blame towards bad advice and for some reason we now need to know that her child has additional needs (hoping for some sympathy I expect). No moral integrity I'm afraid, as expected.

Taxi for Rayner, and don't forget to pay your £40,000 tax bill + fine on the way out.

Edit - And worryingly, the Prime Minister has backed her

 

[Dave]

Well well well, if it isn't our own housing minister not paying the appropriate tax on her own housing purchase.

But, for good measure, let's push the blame towards bad advice and for some reason we now need to know that her child has additional needs (hoping for some sympathy I expect). No moral integrity I'm afraid, as expected.

Taxi for Rayner, and don't forget to pay your £40,000 tax bill + fine on the way out.

Edit - And worryingly, the Prime Minister has backed her

Farage backs his MP who beat up his wife .

However, whataboutary aside, Rayner should own the issue. I don’t care about excuses.

Less bothered about PM supporting her yesterday, you can’t sack someone until there is evidence to do so.