I don't know. The bloke next door said I could sleep in his Anderson shelter if Mrs. Hoy gets the virus. She said she'd use it even if I'm virus free...

I'd look back further to the 'there is no such thing as society' days of the Prime Minister who smashed consensus politics to pieces and sold off most of our assets to the highest bidders.

I think there is at least one who has never revealed she’s female.

What makes you say I am a lover of Cummings? Pure conjecture on your part.
I do think your language is unduly dramatic though. Over the top. I agree, as does everybody else (including the government), that the herd immunity idea was a bad idea - but to describe it as genocidal is absurd.
For genocide think of the Armenians, the Jews, the Tutsi.

Want to give us a clue Bern or is it moderator/member privilege

Is it Daz?

Sorry I can’t. It’s for her to decide and if she wants to keep it quiet, that’s her right. It isn’t Daz though.

Fair play . Stay safe Bernard.

I’ll repeat

Genocide stands for the deliberate killing of a large group of people.

Disagree that “herd immunity” is precisely that? (It kills 1-3%)

Yes or no

No Top Gun. Genocide is a ridiculous and over the top word to use in this context.
Being always right, however, I'm sure you'll disagree.

It’s a willing decision to kill 3 percent of the population

There are 66 million living in the UK. Your wrong,admit it

Kiwipete, presumably.......

Hello Dec. I am sure some of the less salubrious members of the forum would compile a list of runners and riders with appropriate odds....for example

‘Female forum member odds...

Chocolate Gooner 7/4
US Martin 9/4
Harlow 7/2

Etc...

You sure? Daz sometimes goes by the name Daphne.

Kiwi Pet...

Yes, that is completely wrong. Herd immunity is about having enough people eventually catch the disease that the spread slows down significantly. The trick is making sure not too many people catch it at once so the health care system can handle it and everyone can get proper treatment, thus minimizing the death toll.

This is what a lot of countries are going for, including all of Scandinavia. We're not all practicing genocide.

Now that Hazuki has eloquently explained it in the post above this one, I look forward to your retraction.

Well there’s been no retraction of his claim that 90% of the people stockpiling are those who supported Brexit, so I wouldn’t bet any money on there being a retraction on this issue Bromley. Indeed, wasn’t there an attempted justification for that claim based on leave voters lacking a sense of community and wanting to live in isolation?

I didn’t respond but I would suggest you mainly get community spirit in villages and maybe very small towns. But in larger towns and cities where I imagine the huge majority of people live, I think the idea of community spirit is basically pie in the sky. Supermarket shelves were empty for a period across the country, so one has to assume in areas where there was a remain majority as well as areas there was a leave majority.

The idea that the empty shelves in remain areas were that way because 90% of the minority of leave voters in the locality were doing so much of the panic buying is, to use your term from yesterday about his claim, frankly ridiculous.

No, she doesn't post here these days.

He’s wrong too then as he's referring to Scandinavia not the UK

a very rough estimate suggests that we will only reach herd immunity to Covid-19 when approximately 60% of the population is immune (and remember that immunity is currently only reached by getting the infection as we have no vaccine!). The major downside is that this will mean that in the UK alone at least 36 million people will need to be infected and recover. It is almost impossible to predict what that will mean in terms of human costs but we are conservatively looking at 10,000s deaths, and possibly at 100,000s of death

At that point you are making a policy decision to kill thousands in the uk without a single attempt to save lives. Pretty much the definition of genocide

Also scarce.

Why is there always one vile poster on the forum, a troll amongst trolls.

TG you really are a sick fucka......................

Just being factual.

Your some rotten old Alf garnet type. All you know is hate and misery

Genocide is "the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group". As with murder, I think you have to show intent. i.e. killing, with malice aforethought, is the point.

The point of targeting herd immunity is to protect the population, including the elderly and vulnerable. Not enforcing lockdown is bad, maybe even criminally negligent, policy.

Unless however the purpose is to wipe out certain groups, it is not genocide. When deaths are an unintended, even if foreseen and negligent, side effect, it is not genocide.

What you are talking about is probably better defined as "structural violence" which is far more insidious and probably far more deadly than genocide in terms of numbers of people who die.

The deliberate killing of a large group of people.

So if you factually know it kills 3% of a certain demographic (typical old
Or people with repository issues) it’s genocide

Not as we traditionally associate it. For example nazi death camps etc but it’s a genocide policy

Its structural violence (edited my last post). Genocide has a much more specific meaning.

Vile poster.............................

Keir Starmer elected Labour leader......................

At last an opposition party can get to work.

Great speech on Twitter. Let's hope he keeps to his offer to support the Government whildt still opposing it politically but not just for the sake of opposing evrything ecause they are the opposition. Something one of our forum member needs to do...............

This site is now reporting data on tests per million people. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I don't know how accurate these are but interesting none the less.

SA: 898 (tests per million people)
UK: 2,500
France: 3,436
Sweden: 3,654
USA: 4,097
Ireland: 6,119
NZ: 6,867
Germany: 10,962
Australia: 11,203
Switzerland: 16,844
Norway: 18,812

Actually, TG isn't vile (assuming you are referring to him). He does resort to insults and hyperbole rather too easily. But so do you buddy. In spades.

Let's agree to disagree..............

Irresponsible of Sky News to show clips of Keir Starmer being congratulated and old clips with hugging nand hand shakes.

This will give many the idea that it is ok to do the same.............

Breaking news: forum reels in shock as Top Gun reveals he's right and everyone else is wrong.

No need to get wound up about it.

My two pence worth.

Genocide is a very specific word with specific meaning that in no way covers any action which could result in the deaths of *only* 1-3% of the population, and then at random. I think it's very wrong to use such a powerful and specific word so wrongly.

I also don't think that the current HMG policy could be described as eugenics either because there's no specificity to who catches this/dies from it. Also with the elderly being both the most at risk and the most likely to vote Tory it would be a ridiculous concept to pursue.

But, and it is a big but, we have a government led by people who do believe in eugenics. People who do believe that their genes make them superior. People who do believe that there is an underclass which has no productive use to the economy. People who look down on those who didn't have the advantages they had and see them as lesser.

Have these beliefs influenced (and led to) to the current situation? Absolutely. The callous disregard for the number of deaths that current policy will cause is an obvious result of that. But underlying beliefs leading to a situation is not the same as practicing an actual policy.

What we're seeing now could be better described as the clearest example of the continuation of the anarcho-capitalism we've endured for a decade. A decision was made to support the economy over the population. Also political decisions were made to not take the advantages of supply offered by the EU at any cost. Any cost. Herd immunity was a stupid idea from the start as this type of policy has only ever worked in conjunction with a vacine - ironically they gave the examples of polio and smallpox to illustrate how herd immunity works. Taken down to basics the policy was to let the virus run through the country in the shortest possible time regardless of the deaths this would cause. In fact this policy was encouraged by government actually saying people should go out an catch it! Cheltenham was allowed to go ahead when it was obviously a terrible idea (and you don't need hindsight for that) with government advice saying it was fine. LTG (I believe) said he wouldn't have gone there, and neither would I, but people were being advised by a government they trust (!) that it wasn't a problem. People were actually being told to go out and catch it like a '70s chicken pox party. The one break we had in this was actually Arteta testing positive and that leading to football being cancelled because otherwise upwards of a million people would have gone to football that weekend, not to mention all the people that are around football matches. The number of vectors that would have created would have been horrific.

So for me, whilst this policy is proposed and supported by eugenisists, and influenced by that belief, I don't see how it could specifically be called a eugenic policy as there is no precision to it which is at the core of eugenics.

You know how every local pub has a person in it who whilst being harmless no one wants to get caught in a corner with. I'm bloody missing him (and no looking in a mirror won't help, Pete).

A decent take

We will agree to disagree on the genocide comments. Genocide isn’t defined by the size of percentage it’s simply the deliberate killing of a large group of people. I can understand why people think the initial decision was that. When the “herd immunity” policy was announced “Tory genocide” was trending on twitter. Many were horrified and as I said a European newspaper ran a headline saying Britain had chose death and labelled Johnson the most dangerous political leader in the world because he didn’t care the life of his countrymen or women.

On the comments on eugenics I agree. It’s definitely not that but you can see that type of thinking etched into the initial decision to let it run rife to preserve the economy.

What I would also add is that bizarrely Matt Hancock whilst being a complete oddball is something of a national hero. If he hadn’t got together with imperial college London to produce the necessary evidence of the damage the initial policy would have done and presented it to Cummings and Johnson many many more lives would have been lost.

Last word on this from me. I think the word you maybe should be using is massacre. Genocide is the mass extermination of a specific group and was specifically coined to describe the atrocities of the Nazi party and give a name to what Churchill had called 'a crime without a name' (think that quote is right). For me to use it in this case is a devaluation of what the word really means and just plain wrong.

That’s fine and all that but it was a strategy that did kill a specific group of people, ie older and those with respiratory issues. It’s at the heart of Cummings decision, if this was killing middle aged working taxpayers mercilessly and leaving older folks fine I doubt they would have came up with the same strategy.