#lovethatcoat

There’s a huge problem with the British newspapers, in which they all tend to just passively accept the Tory Party’s line. Even the Guardian does it surprisingly-often, and they’re probably the most “critical” paper left. (Though TBH, the Guardian’s opinion columnists seem to fervently-wish that anyone to the left of David Milliband would just STFU and go away.)

The core of the arrangement seems to be that all of them knew each other at Oxford (because that’s where the vast majority of senior Tories, senior journalists and also very senior civil servants did their undergraduate courses), and they’re all mates, so no-one wants to really “rock the boat”. (Plus anyone who does try to get off the boat, will suddenly find that their Tory sources go quiet on them, and they stop getting their exclusive stories.)

It’s a sort of incestuous, post-modern sort of media control; not technically censorship, but is it really still a free press when the press enthusiastically and excitably promotes the government’s view?

We saw it throughout the 2010s, when the press fell over themselves to make excuses for Tory ministers, and this is partly how the current rotten government managed to survive. (That and the greed of the pensioners and the weird gullibility of a certain section of Middle England.)

Only now the whole system is going septic, because they’re pursuing policies that look actively-liquidationist, there are no critical voices (off of Twitter, anyway) and there certainly aren’t any adults in the room.

And we’re not helped by the way canon wobbles back and forth about just how bad the quarians’ situation is. In ME1 it sounded like a widespread immunodeficiency problem, in ME2 Kal’Reegar thinks getting shot by geth in a dirty outdoor area is manageable, and in ME3 you get the impression that one sneeze is The End - until Tali does what she does on Rannoch.

Which, actually, always bothered me. You’d think Rannoch would be *worse* for the quarians, because it’s presumably home to parasites and pathogens that co-evolved with them and are good at living inside them. And during their absence from the planet, who-knows-what kinds of horrors might have developed in animal and plant disease-reservoirs on the planet.

lovethatcoat said:  That’s why I never got why Tali apparently takes off her suit to sleep with mShep. If it’s that dangerous, surely they’d have a culture of suit-on fun activities and maybe artificial insemination for procreation?

Even by my parents’ standards - and I have some truly gnarly stories about unhinged shit they’ve done - this is some next-level feculent madness.

We have an office in Beijing; people in senior management were still doing business trips out there as late as early January. (At that point the Party was still lying about there being any kind of problem.) So I’m actually a little surprised that our office hasn’t already been hit. Oddly, there was a case in my city, but it was at a totally different business. (Though, it occured in a building that I literally walk past 2 or 3 times every day.) So far there’s only the one recorded case in Bristol, but I actually don’t believe there’s only one. There’s bound to be others.

lovethatcoat said:   It’s great that your company is being proactive like that! Yeah the numbers are really uncertain. In Germany it’s mostly people returning from Italy, China, Iran etc being tested and you kinda wonder if they’re missing some deaths. Prof. Drosten from the group who developed the PCR test has suggested combining antibody tests with blood donation infrastructure to figure out how much of the population has already encountered the virus but that’ll take a bit of time.     

Italy I’m puzzled by - I haven’t seen any good theories about why they of all places would get punched quite so hard by this.

sinvraal said:   My company ceo has been sending emails to set up similar, at least on the UK side but also polling us in Canada. I’m super suspicious of the US numbers myself, especially with the nonsense surround test kits. And since we’re right next door… Yeah.     

Yeah, agreed - the American numbers are obviously massive underestimates. From what I can see, it looks like the CDC and the local state health agencies have completely dropped the ball, not helped of course by the storm of useless verbal chaos that’s emitting from the Orange-Haired Idiot. There’s probably also the issue that a lot of people won’t be going to hospital, because the hospital bills are a bigger risk to their wellbeing than the virus itself.

lovethatcoat said:   Good for you! Competent people putting populist assholes in their place is my aesthetic <3                            

The ridiculous aspect to all this is, the Tory Party didn’t win the 2017 general election - but they’ve acted ever since as if they won a huge landslide.