oldcopper

Considering the average age of death from Covid is and always was 82, and the victims almost invariably had various co-morbidities such as obesity, the authorities initial idea of vaccinating the at risk elderly seemed reasonable. The rolling it out to other age groups is incomprehensible though, based on spurious transmission/infection theories for which there has never been any evidence. Pfizer for one never claimed their vaccine had any effect on either transmission or infection, it just mitigated the symptoms. But you wouldn't go and see your granny if you had flu-like symptoms anyway. It's worth seeing Andrew Bridgen (available on his YT channel) empty the Commons last Friday before making some damning observations from the government's own data about the current risk/benefit of continuing the booster programme. An eye opener, but no one debates or debunks what he is saying, which tells the story really.

The weekly Public Health Agency reports were shelved about a year ago, but they were showing the increasing trend that vaccinated people were becoming far more likely to be infected than unvaccinated. The PHA authors were at pains to suggest this might be down to behavioural differences between the two groups, but that was pure speculation, as they couldn't of course admit the other explanation. Perhaps the shelving and the observed trend were connected?

Weren't we told the vaxes were "safe and effective". Wrong on both counts. as soon as Omicron appeared they were of little and rapidly diminishing effectiveness. And I'd love someone to tell me what a "climate change denialist" is and why are they "mad"? It's a flip phrase but I think it means that you question any, and not necessarily all, of the following three points: (1) Is climate change/warming happening? I'll answer that - probably from measurements, but at a much slower rate than all the forecasts from all those experts over the last few decades. And why are we not told of any beneficial effects if it is, like increasing vegetation in colder climes? (2) Is it directly due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 from 0.031% of the atmosphere to 0.038%? Man produces 3% of CO2 produced annually - the other 97% is produced naturally. And is there any proof for this correlation of increased CO2 to global warming? (3) Is the solution of changing from a reliable, controllable, storable and concentrated energy supply to a weather-dependent, intermittent, uncontrollable and non-storable energy supply the correct one? Especially as the energy use and size of an economy are pretty strongly related? And at present wind and solar contribute from less that 1% to circa 10% of our total energy consumption (ie between <5 and 50% of our electricity consumption). So when the wind doesn't blow in Winter we'll need nuclear provision for all our transport, all our central heating and hot water, all our manufacturing industry and construction industries (which we won't have by then due to too little reliable energy) etc etc. How many nuclear power stations will we need for that, small modular ones or otherwise. And how's that construction plan going at the moment? And after 15-20 years most of these wind and solar devices will need replacing, but we can't recycle them very easily because guess what - that'll require a humungus amount of energy!! So the people who worry about this last point are the mad ones? if you believe in all of the above, shouldn't you be losing sleep over China? - it burnt 300 million extra tons of coal (the biggest CO2 emitter of any fossil fuel to amount of energy produced) last year to bring it's annual consumption to over 3 billion tons of coal. But no one seems to blink an eyelid about that.

As soon as the government message is globalist and not a party political divergence, the BBC are eagerly complicit. Climate change being due to man-made CO2 for instance, all the lunacy of Net Zero, and no debate was allowed on anything that questioned the government narrative on Covid, lockdowns or vaccines. Furthermore the BBC actively got Facebook to close down forums for the vaccine injured as "disinformation". Of which my mother nearly died.

For anyone who thinks the Rwanda deal is doing anything in our favour, it is of course not. So in return for sending healthy young men to Rwanda, in exchange we will get unhealthy, sick, old and young parentless refugees, many emotionally and psychologically damaged, from other African wars that Rwanda now wants to get rid of. So Africans don't want the burden of looking after other Africans - offload them onto Britain then, and get paid handsomely for it. And where are all the Albanians etc are going to go when their obviously spurious asylum claims are rejected in Rwanda? - straight back to their mainly peaceful home countries of course. They aren't going to want to stay in Rwanda! No need for Rwanda to sort them out then. As HD says in the video - no one tells us this. The whole of the media stay quiet. Once again we're only given one side of the story. So why are the Left all up in arms about this? Wouldn't this news show how humanitarian and compassionate the government are, and why doesn't the government parade their virtue over this? Well, because the general public are stupid but not that stupid. I wonder what Michael Rosen thinks. Is he prepared to make a financial contribution to the further burden the NHS is going to be under for this charade?

In my limited experience, "people of difference" also form closed communities. I know of three examples that my and other friends' children would never be invited round to ethnic schoolfriend's houses, despite it happening the other way round of course. A shame.

Where do you start on this? It is straight out of the Communist playbook. That wonderful ideology that killed more people in the 20th century than any other ideology. But it will be different next time, honest! These illegal migrants are granted asylum because our system is broken, and the political will is not there to deport them, hence all that is needed is the "asylum seeker's" word, often given to him by the human rights lawyer. They'll now have a form to fill in, given several weeks to fill it in (so someone else can help them) and it'll be in English, so no pesky interview with an interviewer expecting the person to speak the language from where they claim to be from. It's a farce - no Albanians should be given asylum for instance. They're living in a democratic country not at war. This is written by a Marxist, so it is manifestly dishonest - for example the Jews were German citizens who had lived there for generations and centuries when the plan to send them to Madagascar was made. There is no comparison. They weren't illegally entering Germany, knowing they'd be looked after far better than where they came from. And they were targeted specifically for their race - it's laughable that anyone can take this far Left garbage seriously. And would the Germans have agreed to and obeyed a Madagascan tribunal to rule on whether these people had a right to live in Germany? - if so they'd all have been returned of course as they had every right to live in Germany! As it turned out the Jews would undoubtedly have given their eye tooth to go to Madagascar - because the Nazis were infinitely more terrible than that. Another reason for Gary not to make flip comparisons. Where's Braveman building the death camps then? The Left need to grow up if this is their political weapon. So if police chiefs say the drug supply is now connected to the people who have come here illegally, then they presumably know what they're talking about. How does anyone get faux-outraged by that? But Michael Rosen knows differently - where does he get his inside information that the police chiefs are making it up. It's nonsense. Sweden now has the highest rates of gang crime, violent crime and gun crime in Europe having previously had one of the lowest. But should anyone dare to put their finger on what's causing it, there will be Michael Rosen calling them out as a Nazi. There is always complete denial of reality from the Left.

Meander away - but don't take offense when someone points out that what you are saying is not relevant to the thread. You carry on firing away with your definitions of "conflating" though.

Interesting word salad cut and pasted no doubt. Your comment hasn't got anything to do with being "critical", but it implied that "both sides do it so it's no big deal" Thus rather missing the point. And of course no one's talking about the concept of conflation per se, they're talking about what has been conflated and whether it is appropriate. That was the whole point of this Lineker story. If you can't see that.....

He's not saying conflation is wrong, he's saying this example of conflation is wrong. An easy to spot difference I would have thought.

Fair point, but for Gary to even suggest the government "lack compassion" is a strange take when most if not all dinghy travellers are manifestly not refugees, they aren't fleeing war-torn countries, they're paying their way across Europe, then when in a safe country (France) await unauthorised travel across the channel. The obvious point to me is that it is nothing to do with Gary or anyone else's "compassion" - the concept has been shoehorned into a political attack on the Tories. But the Tories have been stupid. There was never a problem deporting illegal immigrants before - every government has done it without anyone blinking an eyelid, including Blair and Brown of course. For some reason the Tories have allowed this to get out of control while promoting pantomime policies like Rwanda that would never work on any large scale, even if they could undertake it. The only takeaway from this mess that I can come up with, is that the government actually have no problem with mass illegal economic migration. But just talk tough and pretend they do. The globalists want open borders, the globalists lend us finance, so this happens - at least that hypothesis makes sense, nothing else does. When there are genuine refugees like Ukrainian women and children, you don't see them hitching a lift across the Channel! There are international frameworks to provide for them.

Sadly, I think his twitter feed does represent the vast majority of the BBC. As can be seen in the mass walkouts and subsequent climbdown by the DG. Polls show 75% of people disagree with Lineker's take on this - which shows that the BBC are not representative of the majority of the paying public. I'm surprised 25% have been so propagandised that they agree with him - open borders are completely unsustainable of course.

Which countries rid themselves of blacks throughout history? I know. It's lucky a certain person can't read this (or so he says) because he would be unable to give me a factual answer, because that would disagree with his dogma..

I hope people aren't being unfair to Gary. Full credit to him, Alan and Ian for fearlessly calling out Qatar, boycotting the World Cup and making very telling comparisons between Qatar's treatment of immigrant workers and illegal immigrants, and Britain's treatment of the same under the Tories. And good luck to Gary in his tax-dodging wheeze with HMRC - losing out on all that money from Qatar must have been a huge financial hit to him, and he must be upset that the tax he's going to save isn't going to be available for the NHS or some other worthy public cause. Still, it'll be going to a much better cause - himself. Great bloke!