It was one thing when he was just trying to shite up the economy for his own ends, but now he's trying to kill people I'd gladly merk the cunt. Stab him, shoot him, just fucking hit the bastard over and over. Break his face to fucking piece with a big hammer, lovely. Also the word filter fucked up your link and Telegraph is pay walled, stop being so sloppy.
>"The average age of a coronavirus fatality is 82: older than average life expectancy. The truth is this horrible illness is only very dangerous for a tiny minority of people."
I would actually stab the cunt to death, honestly. He'd do more as compost than he ever managed in life.
What a fucking waste of space this man is - jumps onto any passing bandwagon that seems to be upsetting people, desperate to get into parliament, and yet rejected by the people seven times.
He's just a grasping opportunist who wants to lord it over us all. I'm with >>90985 in that I hope he meets a painful, violent end.
>"The new national lockdown will result in more life-years lost than it hopes to save, as non-Covid patients with cancer, cardiac, lung and other illnesses have treatments delayed or cancelled again. Suicides are soaring. Businesses and jobs are being destroyed."
>Mr saville and Mr Tice said the UK should follow the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by thousands of experts, which calls for "focused protection" for the elderly and other groups particularly vulnerable to Covid-19, while others continue to live relatively normally. Their email said: "The rest of the population should, with simple hygiene measures and a dose of common sense, get on with life - this way we build immunity in the population. We must learn to live with the virus not hide in fear of it."
Would love to see all the research this apparent genius has done that's going to hold any weight against the ever growing mountain of covid research done by professionals. Why is this even entertained?
Because saville, rightly or wrongly, generates attention. If you want people to read your newspaper, get the comments section abuzz or people to listen then you report on Jimmy saville. People don't sit on the fence when it comes to him and have fairly strong views.
It doesn't matter that he'll never be in a position to do anything about lockdown and the next election is likely to be well after coronavirus dies down, reporting on saville is like lighting the touch paper.
>>90995 That's the point, it's supposed to sound reasonable.
The "Great Barrington Declaration" is bullshit made up by a Libertarian think tank in yankland. Doubtless, the "thousands of experts" who have signed it will mostly be experts without any relevant expertise. The tradition with this sort of thing is to have engineers sign your declaration that god is real or that climate change isn't, because engineers are just overconfident enough to call themselves "Scientists" while not actually-scientist enough to recognize they have no domain specific expertise. In this case, it looks more like they've invited on doctors, nurses, and medical researchers - none of whom actually have to understand how a pandemic works. So you get a nice big figure like "10,000 medical experts agree!" and then when you look them up, all but one obvious rent-a-gob is a fucking podiatrist.
I'm not even hostile to loosening lockdown, I just hate this sort of policy based evidence.
saville is easy to dislike and probably the worst possible ambassador for this idea, but taken at face value this really doesn't seem unreasonable. Healthy people of working age are at a miniscule risk from this virus and our protective measures should reflect that.
>>91000 It turns out that many of the "thousands of experts" weren't even real people. There were at least a dozen Drs Harold Shipman on the list of signatories IIRC.
>>91005 Nothing wrong with engineers specifically, I was just (badly) restating the Salem Hypothesis. ("In any Evolution vs. Creation debate, A person who claims scientific credentials and sides with Creation will most likely have an Engineering degree") since it's the first precedent that came to mind for "Intelligent person speaks confidently outside their area of expertise, and is cited as an expert on this specific matter because they are an expert on some other matter." (of course with the Salem Hypothesis specifically, there's no reason to believe the inverse is true: Creationist Scientists may disproportionately be engineers, but engineers aren't necessarily disproportionately creationist...)
So basically, if a structural engineer tells you that your roof is going to cave in you'd be an idiot to ignore him, and if a structural engineer says you can trust him that the earth is 6000 years old because he's a scientist, you'd be an idiot to believe him. Nothing wrong with structural engineers, they're just not geologists.
I hold the same view about the political views of scientists, which are often trotted out as if they have some unique insight into political affairs which should make their stance more reputable.
Scientists are a weird lot when it comes to politics, mind you. They're often generally left-leaning economically, but they tend to be ruthless on some social matters. I've talked before about how most of my colleagues express support for ideas close to eugenics, and a lot of them have a remarkably laissez-faire attitude on covid.
Generally I put it down to the general concept that working in science trains you to be more comfortable with a cold, detached, "bigger picture" kind of mindset that makes the ends justify the means for the kind of things "normal people" would either never even consider, or would be horrified by on an emotional level.
My colleagues near enough unanimously buy into the idea of human overpopulation and its overall negative impact on the ecosystem, so perhaps that informs a particularly misanthropic set of beliefs. If you view humans as just another part of the bigger system that is nature, it's easy to see our fight against covid as impotent flailing at the tides. Many were saying from the start that this is the big one, mother nature warning us overgrown apes not to get ideas above our station, and that it's senseless to throw everything out the window to fight a losing battle against it.
>>91014 >Many were saying from the start that this is the big one, mother nature warning us
Your colleagues may be scientists but if they're anthropomorphizing nature to the point they're ascribing it conscious intent, they're also idiots.
>>91016 Gaia theory isn't all that far fetched, lad. I don't subscribe to it as a scientist myself, but the Earth's ecosystem being quasi-sentient makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than Christianity. I can see scientists (and indeed know a couple) who are inclined to believe in a higher power finding some sort of comfort in the idea that the Earth will eventually purge us, as it means it's never too late to save the world from man made climate change.
To circle back to an earlier point, I am definitely left leaning but I'm more Libertarian Left than Socialist, though I do have socialist viewpoints. I think that's quite accurate. My friends and family think I'm a cold detached automaton because when an ex partner left me in the shit and they rallied around me I was like "love is just a chemical reaction to encourage people to stay together and raise children, it's nice when it lasts and hurts when it's over, I'll be fine in 1-6 months I don't need to talk about it"
>>91018 I didn't say finding comfort in a thing was evidence of it, did I? I was simply explaining why scientists might find comfort in it.
You don't need to explain correlation =/= causation to me, lad, you're not even my old statistics professor. Unless you are, in which case fuck you and your exponential functions.
It's not that they think Mother Earth is sentient and wants to get rid of us, but the planetary ecosystem being a big self-balancing mechanism is pretty uncontroversial.
Humans are clever enough to have started knocking things out of place, but we have grown arrogant if we think we're above it. If it's not this pandemic it'll be anti-microbial resistance or global warming.
>the planetary ecosystem being a big self-balancing mechanism is pretty uncontroversial.
It is, but the whole global warming thing is the mechanism being out of balance. You can have some self-balancing scales and it's uncontroversial that they'll self-balance, but once you take a hammer to them, assuming that they'll self-balance again afterwards is absurd.
If it wasn't for that meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs, we might not be here today. The talking birds who rule over Earth in 3.450,564 AD will say the same about our climate hubris.
To be less facetious I know what you're saying, but that viewpoint sees humanity as somehow external to that system. We're not.
>>91033 I don't think it does. The idea that the ecosystem can deal with absolutely anything means it has failsafes means it has to be doing this shit on purpose, clearly it isn't as there's no external intervention coming to stop us, it's just the direct consequences of our own actions.
>>91034 >>91024 Pedantic cunt-off alert: The idea of balance of Earth is a failure of perspective that presumes static and simple ecosystems that is debunked by geological record. The Earth is never in balance and we're not special for changing ecosystems - you put all life on Earth into a static environment without humans and you'll still get all kinds of bollocks happening like flying crabs and sentient octopus-men. And probably stuff destabilising the environment but also thriving as a result. What we see as mechanisms is just local chaos being defeated by scale minus time.
How we visualise mankind in the environment is worthy of a library wing in itself and ultimately I see divisions on climate as driven by different perceptions of mankind.
As long as there is sun hitting the surface of this planet, and water in the oceans, there will be life. It won't be necessarily intelligent life, and you might not like what it is, but it will be life. Nature will continue, and absent some kind of truly catastrophic intervention like an asteroid shattering the planet into pieces or the core freezing solid, life on Earth is going to prove exceptionally hard to get rid of now that it's here.
>What we see as mechanisms is just local chaos being defeated by scale minus time.
Agreed, but that is a very difficult concept to sum up and explain. When I say "system" and "mechanism" I don't mean it's actually a loop of a process which always happens and has defined components, but more just a consequence of the way entropy and the universe we occupy works, on the scale of planetary biodiversity.
As inevitably as a car that runs out of fuel will eventually come to a stop, or the ball at the end of a Newton's cradle swings back to its resting position, a human species that destroys and depletes its natural resources will die off. Then, in time, the planet will "recover", as we see in smaller scale in exclusion zones like Chernobyl or Fukushima, and in larger scale like the previous planetary extinction events.
Ultimately a lot comes down to the fact we see our present state of existence as "correct", but the universe doesn't care. The Earth three billion years ago that was just volcanoes and lava lakes was just as correct.
>>91043 >life on Earth is going to prove exceptionally hard to get rid of now that it's here.
Okay but that's not really a self-balancing ecosystem so much as an infection that's never quite shaken.
You lads actually raise a decent point. We should all strive to be a bit clearer in our language when we discuss "climate change", "ecosystem", and so on.
I don't think there's anything wrong with admitting that our primary motivation is preventing human suffering, which involves preserving or improving our present means of life.
The problem comes in that we're actually getting sidetracked by describing possible relationships between humans and environment, and people have radically varying ideas of what that should look like.
The main, incontrovertible fact that we should be focusing on is that we are absolutely fucked unless we realistically confront causes of climate change, like fossil fuel use.
Whether you think we should be living in mudhuts or techno-utopia is largely irrelevant to that fact.
