Luvvies eating media people at the gastro lunch
Brendan O’Neill must be parodying himself.
The pubs are being closed. Oh noes, the backbone of Britain, remember the Blitz, where were you when the old King threw the first football/cricket ball/crumpet.
The barmaid tells us she isn’t sure if they will close at 8 or 10 this evening. ‘We are awaiting government instructions’. I can’t believe what I am hearing. I feel like I am in North Korea. British governments don’t close down pubs, right? Not pubs.
North Korea. Self-parody; has to be.
It is almost too depressing for words. I know that media people and luvvies for whom pubs are just places you go to for a hip gastro lunch consisting of overpriced dirty burgers will think this is over-the-top. Well, then they don’t know the centrality of the pub to life in this country.
Oh come on, that’s too broad even for parody. “media people and luvvies for whom pubs are just places you go to for a hip gastro lunch” – that has more clichés than it has words. It’s staler than ten-year-old bread. Parody is better if it’s a little subtler.
I’m so tough, I don’t need the government to hold my hand and keep me safe!
I’m so not-tough, I can’t handle my local being shut-down.
Where’s that stiff upper lip?
Hell, I can’t handle my local being shut down… But I have to manage somehow.
It makes me deeply unhappy but jeezus… It’s airborne disease and the vectors have to be removed.
What a show of sentimental stupidity. No wonder he edits the Spectator.
Up and down the City Road,
In and out the Eagle,
That ‘s the way you get covid –
Pop goes the O’Neisel!
And on this side of the pond, we’ve got immortal students shrugging off the risk to themselves.
I wonder how many dead spring break partiers there will end up being from beaches being closed too late? Or, more to the point, how many dead family, friends, casual acquaintences and random strangers that come into contact with spring break partiers? Don’t be a Sluder. Don’t be a Leeder. Don’t be an asshole.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2020/03/19/spring-break-beaches-florida-look-packed-despite-coronavirus-spread/2873248001/
Potentially large cluster, I’d say.
At least one case linked to Miami came back to Toronto:
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/324392-young-covid-19-patient-incredible-pain
Yourself and everyone else with whom you had contact Yeah, don’t be an Anzarouth, either.
When Johnson announced that the government would be asking pubs to shut down on Friday night he also warned people against immediately rushing to the pubs because it would be their last opportunity for a while.
My sister in law lives in a village that’s basically just one long street with a pub at one end. When she looked out her window at 8ish last night, virtually the whole population of the village was trudging along the street down to the pub. When her husband walked by later, the pub was absolutely crammed, inside and out.
Great work, idiots.
From The Independent:
The Wetherspoons boss Tim Martin has sparked outrage after he claimed there had been “hardly been any” transmission of the coronavirus in pubs, arguing they should stay open during the outbreak.
The explicit government advice, received from public health experts, is to stay away from pubs, cafes and restaurants to limit the spread of the disease.
Yet the 64-year-old chairman of the pub chain claimed it was “over the top” to shut them, despite admitting he had no knowledge of the science.
“Supermarkets are very, very crowded. Pubs are much less crowded,” he told Sky News.
“There’s hardly been any transmission of the virus within pubs, and I think it’s over the top to shut them. That’s a commercial view, but also a common sense view.”
Mr Martin also claimed that he would take the opportunity to catch the coronavirus under the right conditions – again in defiance of public health messages.
“If someone offered me the opportunity now to have it under supervised conditions, I think I’d probably take it because your chances are very, very good,” he told reporters on a call on Friday.
People with underlying conditions and the elderly have been warned by the government to stay inside as much as possible as they are at the biggest risk of dying.
Piers Morgan was among the many people criticising Mr Martin online.
“This is insane stupidity from a reckless selfish millionaire putting money before health,” tweeted the Good Morning Britain host. “Don’t go to Wetherspoons.”
Downing Street declined to comment directly on Mr Martin’s remarks, but a spokesman said: “We have been clear about the importance of social distancing. We have been clear about our guidance around social gatherings.”
After being repeatedly pressed over Mr Johnson’s opinion of the Wetherspoons boss’s comments, the spokesman was asked whether he was reluctant to voice criticism of someone who has been a political supporter of the prime minister.
Much the same as with the common cold, Covid-19 infected people don’t know anything about it for about 5 days. Which suits the virus just fine. And it counts on a high frequency of dickheads like Brendan O’Neill in its target population, which is all humankind, plus others.
.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/09/coronavirus-sufferers-symptom-free-for-five-days-on-average-study
@Tim Harris – O’Neill doesn’t edit the Spectator. He’s a contributor. The editor is Fraser Nelson. The Spectator is libertarian and loves to take the piss out of worried liberals. There s a right-wing insouciance and and bravado and refusal to follow government directives and advice. It has its place, but not at the moment.
It was the same reaction at the outbreak of WWII about government measures being fascist or Communist, depending on which side of the left/right divide you were on. Actually theatres and cinemas were closed at the outbreak of World War II then re-opened as everyone needed entertainment, when it wasn’t so available at home. No isolation factor – which is the miserable thing about this emergency, that there can be no physical camararderie.
Ah, yes. he’s the editor of ‘Spiked’, I see – I didn’t get beyond that first ‘Sp’, and thought that was quite enough to damn the man. Sorry about that. So it’s Fraser Nelson who’s the culprit. Ah, and the Spec is ‘libertarian’, ‘loves to take the piss…’, it has ‘insouciance’, ‘bravado’ etc – how sweet, how BRITISH! I am in fact British, and have not had much time over the years for the Spectator, though friends have said that at least at one time its book reviews were quite good, if nothing else. Taki’s racy twitterings, the narrow snobby public-school Englishness of its appeal I have found, I’m afraid, on the few occasions I have looked at it, profoundly unappealing. Admittedly, I lost my sense of humour at birth, a defect that was aggravated by a public-school education. When you have actually had to put up with such an education and the people who go with it for a few years, you are – if you have any sense – inoculated against it for life. There are, however, those who prefer to remain public schoolboys for life. They end up editing or writing for The Spectator, and perhaps even becoming prime minister. (The present prime minister’s father also seems to be fond of pubs, especially if going to one is a smack in the eye for some abstract and expert authority.) I’m afraid I am very well inoculated against such charms as the Spectator may be thought to possess, whoever it is edited by.
These last-minute pub-goers are like the spring break partiers. They’re not just taking the risk for themselves. Even under the Thatcherite formula of “there is no such thing as ‘society,’ just individuals and their families,” you’d think they’d have a care for their own familiy’s health?
The nice thing about the fact that O’Neill edits Spiked as opposed to the Spectator is that he would love to be famous for being the editor of the Spectator as opposed to Spiked.
Omar @ 7 – actually significantly longer than 5 days, which is part of the problem. It remains furtive for a loooong time so people relax a bit and boom, out it pops.
We have a school here in town that was requiring study abroad for their students. So now the students have come back from coronavirus infected areas; we now have our first case in town, but she had self-quarantined. Most of the students chose not to self-quarantine, because it was inconvenient. How many more cases will we have next week?
And I don’t think the school can force them to quarantine, but they did close the school the day before they came back so other students wouldn’t be exposed, which is something, I suppose. They should have been quarantined at the border, or something.
So now there is a fuss in town about the college requiring study abroad.
The Spectator is a little too classy and weighty to have the likes of O’Neill anywhere near the editing pen. He’s one of their tame jesters, like Taki, and Rod Liddle. There is some decent writing there eg Nick Cohen, but the whole tone – let us not be TOO serious, like the grubby self-righteous lefties, gets very wearying. I vastly prefer the New Statesman.
It occurs to me that BJ should’ve announced pub closures before the opening of business the day of… I mean, what would you expect people to do?
Yes, I vastly prefer The New Statesman; and also have a fair bit of respect for Nick Cohen. I imagine ‘Spiked’ is a magazine where articles that have been spiked by every other publication eventually find a welcome and a home. I wonder what its readership is, apart from Brendan.
The quick, and very dirty, wiki on Spiked.
> The magazine was founded in 2001 with the same editor and many of the same contributors as Living Marxism, which had closed in 2000 after being sued for libel by ITN. It is funded in part by donations from the Charles Koch Foundation.