rodshaw
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Can anyone give me some info on the history of long-term adverse effects from vaccines. One of my neighbours, though not anti-vax per se, isn’t going to have a Covid vaccine because it’s unproven and there’s no way of knowing of adverse effects in the longer term. He would (quite sensibly) rather remain healthy than have tens of thousands of pounds of compensation lobbed at him years hence (assuming liability could be proved).
Frankly I think he’s got a point.
Fair enough. It’s maybe unfortunate that the word ‘medieval’ as a derogatory term is pretty much in common usage. But I suspect many people who use the word casually don’t really think the Middle Ages were all bad, it’s just one of those expressions whose meanings have become skewed and is maybe not to be taken too literally.
“NOTTHATWEWOULDBEALLTHATCOMFORTABLEREADINGINTHECLASSICALROMANWAYNORHANDLINGINTERMINABLYLONGSCROLLSBECAUSETHESPINEDBOOKWEALSOOWETOTHEMIDDLEAGES
Just demonstrating that reading as the Romans were used to would not be so easy.”
Well, yes, quite. Nobody would write like that now. But that misses the obvious distinction between the capital letter forms themselves, unsurpassed for over two millennia, and the way in which they’re presented.
But I’m not particularly bigging up the Romans over the Middle Ages, and I agree they’re a fascinating period.
Quite how relevant this is to socialism I’m not sure, apart from the Morris connection and the fact that in a socialist society we’d have more time to appreciate the good things of the past (if we were interested in looking back).
“The letters you are now typing in are one of the Middle Ages’ many legacies to our humanity.”
Yes indeed, more or less. Lower case is derived from the Carolingian minuscule, circa 9th century. Italics came into use in the 15th and 16th centuries.
But our upper-case letters were perfected in the Roman era.
Good idea. Do you suggest we use some method in addition to our usual outlets, and go for wider distribution?
Looks like there is now going to be a deal in case of no deal:
“The word Vaccine is wrong, the original virus came from horses instead of cow, it was horsepox instead of cowpox”
Someone, somewhere is probably setting up a campaign right now to have the word changed, on the ground that it’s unfair to horses.
I don’t know whether it’s because the pandemic has made people more health-conscious, or just because a few ex-footballers have recently been diagnosed with dementia, but it looks as if heading may be on the way out. Health-wise, that can’t be a bad thing.
I often wonder what football would be like in a socialist society. Would it just be a runabout in the local park, or would there still be organised matches with proper rules? How about one village against another, in a sort of pre-industrial free-for-all?
Another journalist, Matthew Syed, singing the praises of capitalism in yesterday’s Sunday Times.
“Join me in a toast to capitalism – still our only hope for progress”
In part he’s writing in criticism of Mark Carney’s Reith lecture in which he said we should move away from market norms to “moral norms”.
What in fact he’s railing against is the big, dominant corporations that keep the smaller players out of things and lead to corruption. All free markets need is better people in them, he says.
He mentions socialism but to be fair, the type of “socialism” he compares free market capitalism with is the rigid, centralised state control which we in the WSM would call state capitalism.
“It’s easy to forget how systems of free exchange miraculously assemble technology such as toasters without any single person having a clue about what’s going on”.
He concludes that we should liberate the virtues of free exchange. “It’s a though that strikes me every morning when I use my pop-up toaster”.
There’s no mention of the poverty, unemployment, racism, war, environmental destruction and other ills that are the product of the wonderful system he supports.
And as if a sane, democratic, free socialist society wouldn’t have the nous to produce toasters! And they would have more of a clue about what’s going on, too.
“As with providing healthcare, building emergency hospitals, reducing unnecessary work and travel, the pandemic offers signs of what can be done and how it can be done quickly if the urgency was there.”
Not to mention the speed with which vaccines were produced from several quarters. Things like this could probably be done even more quickly in socialism with a concerted effort rather than multiple competing efforts.
The pity is that it’s not just the capitalists who vaunt their system as the best possible. You have journalists such as Liddle in The Sunday Times saying the same thing, because it produces good as well as bad.
And sadly the ‘move towards socialism’ desired by a significant minority of millenials is at best a watering-down of capitalism’s worst effects while leaving the system itself intact.
The people doing the real work to produce these vaccines have been workers beavering away in labs.
Of course, when the vaccines become available the pharmaceutical companies involved are going to make a killing. Especially if it’s a case of two jabs apiece every year.
Apparently the three main contenders have respectively 95%, 90% and 70% effectiveness. So guess which the government is ordering most of? That’s right, the cheapest. Which happens to be the 70% one.
Having said which…’the birth of a biosecurity state guaranteed to mean the loss of civil liberties, wholesale’. Eh what? Was the email to HO from a party member?
Bijou Drains: “there might be a bit of a levelling out of teams.”
It’s certainly looked a bit that way so far in the Premier League, quite open at the top with only three of the usual mob in the top six and the Manchesters and Arsenal fairly low down but it’s early doors (as they say) and there are signs that the big guns are creeping up as they adapt. (When the crowds do come back they’ll probably have to adapt all over again).
I think it’s much the same as ever in the Championship and below though. Although I really marvel at the fact that all the clubs are still going. Some have had to postpone quite a few games because of positive Covid tests. While the big clubs can carry on while they get just one player to isolate, lower clubs have to isolate the whole team and postpone matches, as is happening currently to York City. That said, they wouldn’t be getting any income anyway by playing with no crowds.
