Could be. He strikes me as a bit … abnormal. He certainly doesn’t have the interlocution skills you’d expect of a lawyer (barrister?).
On the same theme, I’ve just been watching this:
A very wide-ranging discussion here in 20 minutes. I agree with most of what they’re saying here. The COVID files are a disgraceful indictment of Britain’s descent into anti-intellectualism, political dishonesty, populism, and third-world-grade governance. It’s hard for me to see how anything is salvageable from all this.
My take on Matt Hancock is he decided/was persuaded early on that ‘the science’ proved that vaccinating everyone was the only way. Then, he got into his head that he would be the hero who saved the British people from themselves. Oh, they would love him so much that he might get a pop at the top job.
Dunning-Kruger effect, ego, plus ambition.
I’m considering reading his, presumably totally shit, book. Just to compare it with his private messages. It will be interesting to see how they match up.
He seems to have somehow figured that, by virtue of the fact that he was the health minister, ergo he must be the smartest person in the room re. health-related matters. Basically he decided that he was the nation’s top doctor.
It’s incredible that he was making decisions about public health when he has no background in health. Overruling advisers. I’m not saying I agree with the advice he was being given, but how could he decide on the isolation period? It’s ridiculous.
Same info as what @fumarole posted just above, I think.
Not sure why this is getting so much attention. It just seems to say genetic material of animals was found at Wuhan market where COVID was present.
That evidence, they said, was consistent with a scenario in which the virus had spilled into humans from a wild animal.
Yeah, along with about 18 other scenarios?
But the genetic data from the market offers some of the most tangible evidence yet of how the virus could have spilled into people from wild animals outside a lab.
Really? News flash–we know viruses can spill into people from wild animals outside a lab. It doesn’t tell us anything about how it could have happened, unless we’re still counting “Wuhan Market!” as “how”.
The NYT article also seems to say the source of this new data is murky.
“But,” he said, “given that the animals that were present in the market were not sampled at the time, this is as good as we can hope to get.”
Unintended consequences, or entirely predictable? Kids aren’t all stupid: one component here seems to be a broad realisation among teenagers that their elders are clowns who shafted the kids for no good reason. Another large group are simply away with the fairies.
It’s much worse, incidentally, in low-income countries. In the Philippines kids were locked in their homes. Parents lost their jobs and therefore the ability to cover school costs. Lots of feral kids just wandering around now in areas which were previously scraping by well enough. That’s going to morph into a rise in crime, teenage pregnancy, and possibly gang/terrorist recruitment.
Not sure why this even popped up in my YouTube recommendations, but I found it very interesting. I’m putting it here because although it discusses a philosophical viewpoint described by Singer in the 1970s, I saw an almost identical train of “reasoning” lead to the COVID nonsense. Singer, IMO, is an intellectual lightweight who talks himself into preposterous positions by flawed reasoning (see, in particular, his arguments about animal rights). But just have a look at how this philosophy professor lays out Singer’s arguments for a kind of radical selflessness. Strong echoes here of “if it saves just one life”, “take one for the team”, “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “don’t kill granny”. These things were self-evidently stupid because they did not work, but we had people here on forumosa and in the public sphere arguing vociferously for these positions.
The errors here are multiple, IMO. Just off the top of my head:
Lumping “good” things and “bad” things into simple binary categories, and then eliding from one obvious “bad” (a kid drowning) where we have a moral duty to mitigate it, to a position where almost anything can be considered so.
The idea that sacrifice inevitably leads to the alleviation of bad things.
Equating something small with something nonexistent. On its own, going without a cup of coffee from Starbucks on Tuesday is an insignificant event. Never drinking coffee of any kind, ever, on the basis that you might thereby mitigate some harm, is not merely logically dubious but a diminishment of the human experience. Take that far enough - should we deny ourselves any food except the bare minimum required for life? - and we end up encountering a “bad” that we must mitigate by, um, further sacrifice.
Ignoring the fact that the world is a incredibly complex place, and that enjoying a coffee may produce myriad positive side-effects, most of which we might not even be able to tease out.
I was intrigued to see such an obviously nonsensical theory was considered seriously enough for someone to write a paper about it. And it seems to me we were plunged into a Singerian world in 2020, perhaps because the midwits-in-charge had insufficient intellect to cope with a relatively trivial moral conundrum.
If all the conspiracy theories turned out to be true, and this one is from a doctor, then apparently a lot of us are magnetic now. Should I fact check this?
Mad doctor: exists
Conclusion: everyone who doesn’t agree with The Narrative agrees with the mad doctor. Or something.
Doctors are human, and as such are as capable of going looneytunes as anybody else. The claim of the people who support science (as opposed to The Science™ ) is precisely that far too many doctors have gone looneytunes, prompting them to spread outrageous claims for magic vaccines which are no less ridiculous than suggesting that said vaccines make you magnetic.
The specific conspiracy theories that have been proven correct (e.g., Big Pharma controls regulatory agencies and wrapped the whole COVID narrative around their profit motives) have been discussed at length.
IIRC about 70,000 doctors and other healthcare professionals signed the Great Barrington declaration. How many of them, do you think, are conspiracy theorists who believe that 5G towers are a tool of Satan? Is it possible that at least a few of them are just ordinary doctors who want to treat patients in a rational and time-honoured manner?
