love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

"You can get a fine for not carrying your ID here but doubt it is being used in my area which is quite middle class"

bad grammar and all quote from my scouser in Berlin pal is probably quite telling!

barely even 24 hours since hatt mancock delivered his bold promise to the nation, enchanting john crace in the process, and already the fucking wheels are falling off

The UK government’s pledge to carry out 100,000 coronavirus tests a day by the end of the month is unravelling, with NHS laboratory staff and scientists warning they do not have the test kits, chemicals and components they need to scale up.

Boris Johnson is personally calling the major companies that make test kits to try to secure the UK supply, it has emerged, in competition with prime ministers and presidents from around the world.

And not to get all fbpe on you but this is kind of an indicator of their capacity to negotiate trade deals without the bargaining clout of the EU behind us

tbf, France has just has 600m masks nicked by the US and Germany a bunch of ventilators.

sounds like an argument for the EU sticking together. hugely depressing to think how the poorer nations of the world are going to fare in obtaining the supplies they need

Like to think the supply chain/manufacturing issues might be sorted out by then

Hopefully. At the moment, any US badged manufacturers are being told to break contracts and send all vital supplies to the States under pain of criminal penalties. Chinese badged manufacturers are having people turn up at their shipping bases and waving pallet loads of Dollars at them. If Germany can’t compete financially, god help anyone else.

Presumably Trump hasn't thought too far ahead about what's going to happen to the US when all its trading partners are dead.

In "it ain't getting any cleverer out there" news:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/03/broadband-engineers-threatened-due-to-5g-coronavirus-conspiracies

In one widely circulated video that has attracted millions of views on Twitter alone, individuals working for the broadband company Community Fibre are abused by a woman who claimed without any evidence that they were installing 5G as part of a plot to kill the population.

“You know when they turn this on, it’s going to kill everyone, and that’s why they’re building the hospitals,” she tells the baffled engineers on a London street. “Do you have children, do you have parents? When they turn that switch on, bye bye momma. Are they paying you well enough to kill people?”

A spokesperson for the company said it does not use 5G anywhere in its network and praised the calm response of its staff.

was added to a local area #covid whatsapp group by a labour councillor - lots of videos, adverts for homeopathic cures and 5G conspiracy material

ffs

I'm guessing the 5G truthers will not be availing themselves of its improved service when it's rolled out then? 2G till I die!

there will be no one using 5G because when they switch it on it is going to kill everyone - that's it, that's the plan

Pretty sure they said that about the Large Hadron Collider too.
Just found out a highly intelligent person I know is a 5G-er, sigh. Severe anxiety going on there too which is the key I guess.

I decided to watch HIGNFY tonight because the photos on Twitter looked weird, hope nobody was as foolish as me, it was so terrible I couldn't take more than a few minutes Also Helen Lewis was on it.

Was just about to post something about hignfy to comedy thread. I've been on funnier conference calls.

Mash report was kind of the same, all done from spare rooms with a tiny bit of pre filmed footage. Worked better because it relies less on interaction. Obvious deficiency was lack of auto cue - nish kept looking at his laptop.

I have 5G home broadband and no rona (or do I?)

This is a bit of good news.

The conviction was quashed. But it appears: she was detained (unlawfully)in police cells for 2 nights; tried in her absence -she did not speak in court (abuse of process ),denied important fair trial rights(basic!)Appears DJ read papers, convicted & sentenced with woman in cells

— Kirsty Brimelow QC (@Kirsty_Brimelow) April 3, 2020

I hadn't realized the 5G thing had got so widespread. Twitter sent an alert saying "No, 5G doens't cause coronavirus". I presume this went to everyone?

I watched the conspiracy video for a laugh. The comments were full of people saying "Satellites? Stop talking that Spherist crap")

Flat Earth stuff is fascinating as its been growing in popularity for a while now. I had assumed mostly kind of ironically but...

I decided to watch HIGNFY tonight because the photos on Twitter looked weird, hope nobody was as foolish as me, it was so terrible I couldn't take more than a few minutes Also Helen Lewis was on it.

g’s 1-4? fine, love ‘em, can’t get enough
5g: a g too far, absolutely fatal to human tissues, also will allow the chinese government to remotely defrost my freezer at will

xxp not at all ironically, there was a piece a while back which mentioned content moderators for Facebook were becoming flat earthers.

Yeah, I know! I think the initial resurgence of flat earthing over the last maybe 5-10 years was in part subconsciously ironic but that element has largely gone now. What once seemed a frivoluous OG of conspiracy theories now seems more entwined less outlandish ones

If we're gonna have a plague we might as well have the full medieval experience.

Friend of a friend knows a bunch of flat earthers at his kung fu class (where else), when presented with pictorial evidence of a round planet their response is always "Jewish Hollywood, mate" (this guy is Jewish btw). Morons gonna moron, what can you do?

Its probably been mentioned elsewhere but a side effect of the gradual erosion of trust in the political process, in experts, and in institutions in general might well be an erosion of trust in reality itself.

yes i mentioned that on the deepfakes thread. that the consequences of deepfakes won’t be so much the easy dissemination of falsehoods - that happens pretty well already - it’s that no one will believe the truth

Nice to see the fucking melts celebrating on my timeline today.

what a fucking shitty day.

Nice to see the fucking melts celebrating on my timeline today.

well. obv.

Timeline where?

Facebook for me, though I'm sure other social media platforms (including yr friend twitter) will look similar.

I think you have the wrong friends.

Its probably been mentioned elsewhere but a side effect of the gradual erosion of trust in the political process, in experts, and in institutions in general might well be an erosion of trust in reality itself.

I wonder if this is true, a lot of the country seems positively desperate to put its trust in the government and its institutions right now, even as the evidence mounts that the government is entirely unworthy of that trust.

These are probably not the same people propagating 5G myths but all sorts of psuedo-scientific guff is flying around WhatsApp right now, a lot of it well-intended. Difficult to ascribe any consistency of thought to the conspiracy theorists but people just seem incredibly bad at evaluating information they see online. Some of it arises from too much trust rather than the reverse.

Yep, the switch from ‘the government is right not to overreact, follow the experts’ to ‘the public should be ashamed for not taking this as seriously as the government is’ was whiplash-inducing. I think a lot of it is less about slavishly following the government line than kneejerk scepticism of an imagined establishment they see as opposed to it, though.

I was reading somewhere that most national leaders are experiencing a bounce in their poll ratings right now, even Trump, even Conte. If anything it's reflective of the fact that populations are absolutely fucking terrified right now and the idea that they are governed by people who don't know what they're doing is too frightening for people to really confront right now. That will curdle into rage and rampant mistrust before too long but doesn't seem to be happening just yet.

Flat earthers should be into 5G. 5G is very line of sight so totally unsuited to a world where the curvature of the earth gets In the way.

I've got some almost out of date cream in my fridge that will last longer than the Trump + Boris ratings bounce

also some of it could be nervous pollsters not wanting to undermine the govt during a national emergency.

heard two or three paranoid-sounding conversations and saw a "Police State Virus!" graffito during my alloted Exercise and Shopping Sponsored by Wetherspoons hour

if i was a copper's nark i should prbobaly be outraged by these little pockets of people hanging out but i'm just tired and confused by having to shop for food in these conditions

I think you have the wrong friends.

Casual acquaintances, more like, but yeah not every friend I have is a good socialist.

Yep, the switch from ‘the government is right not to overreact, follow the experts’ to ‘the public should be ashamed for not taking this as seriously as the government is’ was whiplash-inducing.

My FB neighbourhood group is overrun by "people are in the park, WHY???" type stai informer behaviour and one dude actually replied "well it's metropolitan elites, they always think they know better, just look at brexit". The contortions people twist themselves into.

fwiw "the people are to blame, only in this country!" is a popular take in Portugal as well, despite being hailed as one of the countries that responded best to the crisis

People have had it drummed into them for forty years that anything that goes wrong in a person's life is down to individual fuck-ups rather than government policy. Takes a while to get out of that.

at least for Portman Park fans there is a virtual grand national today, what fun!

And the worse it gets the more extreme the contortions will be, god forbid anyone should ever admit they were wrong about anything.

xpost

I've got some almost out of date cream in my fridge that will last longer than the Trump + Boris ratings bounce

I wouldn't necessarily count on it disipating all that soon. Starmer's disappearing act can now enter its final phase and Biden and the last complete sentence he uttered were in different decades.

The various oppositions have given almost no indication what it they would do.

I wonder if this is true, a lot of the country seems positively desperate to put its trust in the government and its institutions right now, even as the evidence mounts that the government is entirely unworthy of that trust.

Well this is only in the case of some people obviously, the majority of the population aren't becoming flat earthers (many experts are saying this is around 18 months away)

:(

Five London bus workers who tested positive for Covid-19 have now died, the Unite union said.