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

Just to be clear I think closing parks is bullshit unless people are really dramatically flouting the rules inside them. London is too dense to sustain a summer lockdown without them, I think.

🖼

It is a blame-the-public play like others have said. But there might be something in it all the same.

an ever-increasing rigidity seems to create more problems than it solves, to me. there has to be a level of controlled flexibility that recognises that people need to get outside sometimes, and i don't think the UK gov and police have handled it at all well at the moment.

as i understand the facts of transmission people are still at far more risk from going to bullshit jobs that shouldn't be happening, travelling on public transport to get to those bullshit jobs, and visiting supermarkets which everybody is compelled to do, rather than sitting in a park several feet apart from anybody else.

I think I get the chart but I can't stop seeing "-40" in both directions.

and if you take away all the carrots that normally help people deal with the grind of their existence then you'll need more than blitz spirit to keep a lid on that.

not justifying individuals' (a)moral choices but this whole situation needs to be managed by finer minds than politicians and cops

idk if it creates more problems necessarily - but the more rigid you are in the rules, the more you need to be committed to ruthlessly policing them. A halfway house where the public and the police are both expected to use their own judgement just leads to the latter making up the law as it goes along and arbitrarily deciding who to enforce it against.

it creates problems because given the logistics of staffing it's unpoliceable? and the harder they try and whackamole people into their houses the more pushback there's likely to be

The notion that all those people miles apart from each other in the park are taking an unacceptable risk but if they were doing fucking Pilates it would be fine is an absurd one and shouldn’t be given the time of day

My idea for the day is that ice cream vans should drive round the houses selling bread and milk and stuff like that, kind of surprised they're not doing it already tbh

they used to if you lived on the right estate

... and heroin, like the good old days.

travelling on public transport to get to those bullshit jobs

You'd think the fact that five London bus drivers have just died might ring a bell or two but...

then there was the "toffee apple van" that used to go round Great Thornton Street which was a kid lying in the back of an estate car and pretty fucking blatantly selling zero toffee apples and loads of gear

That’s possibly true but it might be too early to say so definitively when a bunch of countries are whack-a-moling their people into stopping at home and seeing reductions in the number of cases. It does require a heavy police presence and for a deterrent effect to do most of the heavy lifting. Whether it’s sustainable for more than a few weeks is the question. I’m reluctant to say France and Italy have overreacted but idk what the situation there is going to look like by the end of this.

Xps.

zero toffee apples is how many i would ever want tbf

We are truly in weird times when I feel sympathy for London bus drivers, believe you me.

hope you realise i'm not radge and shouting for "let's all run wild in the streets" SV, just thinking about this stuff. do we really have an accurate picture of how many people are sneaking out for crafty sunshine in any of the other countries tho? it's not gonna be reported in our media the same way that "look at these terrible plonkers" is

the last universal social patrolling exercise the UK undertook was in WW2 i think? = (a) rationing and (b) curfew and lights out for air raids

ppl policing the latter entered the public myth-space as "little hitlers" while ppl flouting the former (= spivs selling nylons i guess) were disapproved of but everyone knew one and nearly everyone partook of their services*

of course we didn't have other european approaches to compare and and contrast

*my mum's parents were tremendously proper and correct abt this and still got dobbed in for cheating even tho they didn't (i mean maybe they did but i don't believe it, they would never)

by war's end a pragmatic modus operandi existed but i bet the first few months were curtain-twitch hell

luckily curtains with black air-raid material stitched in were heavy and hard to twitch and you got yelled at if you did

my dad told a story about my grandad doing a favour for one of the spivs he worked with and being rewarded with a ginormous wheel of cheddar in his locker one Monday morning, which he freaked out about and told the guilty party to get rid of pronto

my friend in the whatsapp who is trapped in spain with his mum says the official policing of the shutdown there has already somewhat adapted more towards pragmatism after a similar bad start in both directions

hope you realise i'm not radge and shouting for "let's all run wild in the streets" SV,

Yes, of course, and this stuff should all be critically assessed, particularly in a country where a fair proportion of voters would be in favour of fines for people outside of their houses without good reason even if there wasn’t a pandemic.

cheers i just didn't want to come across like a dick whatabouting it all lol

I've been getting the bus c.twice a week to go to (NHS) work and the fact that five London bus drivers have died so far shit me up

Also infuriating that the week on March where this really kicked into gear was when the decision to stop routemaster buses boarding at the back and middle was implemented

Like the one fucking time a routemaster could have been useful to anyone

I'd have thought the risk for drivers is more from other bus drivers if they're sharing vehicles. Otherwise they've got more protection than most shopkeepers.

Starmer: I would support ban on outside exercise over rules flouting

auspicious start

austere finish, no doubt

There are reason levels of supportave that could possibly be vindicated right now but Starmer is basically a suppository

There are 48,000 acres of golf courses within London and the Metropolitan Green Belt (shown in red on map below)

Why not open them up to public for exercise, as @RosamundUrwin suggests? https://t.co/V2ioJj85yv

Easier to maintain social distancing if existing parks less crowded. pic.twitter.com/cOb1baLAXQ

— Guy Shrubsole (@guyshrubsole) April 5, 2020

― ymo sumac (NickB), Sunday, April 5, 2020 12:24 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i'm lucky enough to live on a road that backs onto royal ashdown golf course which itself backs onto ashdown forest. just been out and there are people about but you can see them coming from 100's of yards away and p easy not to get nearer than 30 yards of them.

I've got a similar thing, but with less auspicious sounding places on my doorstep but still nice! it's like winning the lottery during a lockdown

I suppose to an extent it's like "Why is there a speed limit when it's already illegal to drive a car unsafely?" - you set a high target as a crude measure. There will be people who are safe over the limit, much as there are people who can go about their business carefully - but there'll be a lot more whose vision of themselves aren't matched by reality.

but clearly very nearly everybody *is* obeying the rules.

I am incredibly envious - it's wall to wall cunts up here. Well-meaning cunts by and large, but that hardly matters.

Gotta say, the only people I’ve seen flouting social distancing in Holborn are little clusters of police officers, standing around chatting.

Scottish CMO getting absolutely slaughtered at today's presser for going to her holiday home at the weekend. She's the public face of the stay at home campaign here.

I get that she fucked up but you'd think she'd spent the weekend smothering grannies by the reaction.

The undercurrent here is, we need the stay inside shit because of the wholesale Tory attack on the NHS. We're having to do this so that the hospitals can cope. I dunno what I feel about it, been following the rules, only going out to shop a couple of times a week. I don't hold out high hopes for people being able to do this indefinitely.

xp lol just observed some of that reaction on social media

It's all our fault, do you see? And overpaid footballers.

The people with burning stakes for the CMO didn't ask too many questions about the heir to the throne travelling from London to Balmoral while symptomatic.

Or the Secretary of State for health having covid for like three days before leaving the house for a press conference.

i'm pretty tipsy now so this is half-formed and badly thought but it seems to me that this situation is a huge stress-test on the way government and society works, and what we're seeing is mostly that "the system" isn't up to the task, fundamentally. the infantilisation of the relationship between people and authority, the supply chains, social welfare, some of the basic ways we interact with one another, the way we conceptualize the nature and function of the state.

that's all immaterial and drunky in the face of the pragmatics of trying to minimize a death toll but every stupid problem we're gonna come across comes out of that stew. global "society" - this is a wrong and inadequate word but i can't nail down the right word at the moment - has effectively had its head chopped off and the most likely, common response is "how can we get our head back on asap?"

this isn't a judgement or anything, these are probably questions that don't bear considering outside of academic contexts, but it's...interesting how fragile the mental order of things is, tho i'm sure power and sublimated violence and the very real desire for the safety of routine are gonna step in as hard as they can to fix the breach.

it can't be repeated enough just how relatively *feeble* an apocalypse it's taken for the "developed" world's wheels to loosen

Yes it's exposed the fragility of nearly all our existing structures, virtually everything will need to be strengthened or rebuilt differently. Whether that can be kept at the front of enough people's minds when life begins to return to a semblance of normality is a different question.

Central bank functions seem to be broadly doing when they're meant to but everything else feels like it's at breaking point.

The system isn't working because the system just isn't designed to be deliberately stopped, virtually in its entirety, for months on end. That doesn't even happen during a war.

Being pessimistic here but an oligarch-ish land grab feels like the more likely outcome than any kind of serious reassessment of the relationship between the state and the wider economy/society. There will be a lot of distressed assets out there in the private sector waiting to be hoovered up and the government itself will be desperate to be seen to be clawing some money back.

yes, that's what i was trying to get at. my best guess is still a desperate push to return to the before times, but we'll see.

The Times published an article during the election with the words “the Muslim question” and Starmer makes his first address in the same paper

— Aniqah (@AniqahC) April 5, 2020

he's certainly done nothing to assuage anybody's concerns in the last 24 hours

(official US-style response) HEY AT LEAST HE'S NOT BOJO RIGHT?

no self-respecting LOTO deals with Murdoch scum press, never mind doing it exclusively behind a Murdoch paywall. What a fucking waste of skin.

remember he told the scousers he wouldn't do it and told the fabians the next day he would. fucking worthless melt.

I've actually got more respect for Boris than Starmer.