Comments by "gerhard7" (@gerhard7323) on "Christmas in Ukraine u0026 Andrew Neil 's review of 2022 – The Week in 60 Minutes | SpectatorTV" video.

  1. Don't know why Neil is nodding in agreement with Shriver's pithy assessment of the utter catastrophe and shameful piece of political theatre that was lockdowns. If memory serves he'd have had us all frog marched down to the centres and held down to be jabbed if he'd had his way.
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  2. I take your point, but he was making a broader point about how social stigma often has the ability to rein in society's worst excesses. I think he's making the argument that having no social stigma at all ie a generally held disdain for certain behaviours, is a far worse proposition than having at least some. His giving up of smoking and the undoubted role that social stigma played in that 'choice', chiselling away for years at his subconscious perhaps, is highly illustrative of those tensions.
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  3. Always love Rod Liddle, but one can't help feeling he's just left the party in the other room, closed the door and told everyone to keep it down for 10 minutes.
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  4. Rod 'Mr Tinsel' Liddle.
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  5. UK inflation today, were it measured in the same way as the 1970s, would be around 17%. Sure, still less than the worst of that decade, but Neil is not comparing like with like and I'm sure that he's more than bright enough to know that.
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  6. Given your job it might be worth you looking at the 20 year plus history of the GBP to single currency to get a bit more perspective there.
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  7. 'Are we, in some ways, lusting after a threat which helps to explain our response to covid?' Proper nailed it there Freddie.
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  8. Wasn't he the big bad orange man?
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  9. The IMF financial call in the 1970s by Healey was tenuous at best and yet it seems to form the spine of today's right wing narrative. UK finances today are markedly worse by most comparable metrics than in the mid-70s, but people like Andrew Neil have been propagating and dining out on this myth for decades now.
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  10. £10k spent, say, on house in 1975 would be worth the equivalent of around £70k today allowing for inflation ie 7x the amount. Needless to say a house bought for £10k in 1975 would cost considerably more than that £70k today. The alleged economic miracle attributed to the right by the likes of Andrew Neil is built upon the perpetuation of ever higher asset prices, most notably property and its burgeoning associated debt, and forever ensuring their limited supply. Appealing politically to that sentiment has warped our politics for the worse for decades I would posit. The movement of more women into the labour force since the 1970s, as mentioned by Rod Liddle there, has, in part, been due to these rapidly rising property prices and the population's shifting attempts to afford them, for example.
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  11.  @smillner771  D'uh. I suspect I might have a far greater understanding of inflation than you do, but exchange rates also play into the mix. Go and look at how the GBP has fared against the single currency since its inception until now and then come back and tell me it's all because of Brexit.
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  12.  @smillner771  I don't and I'm sure you won't look either. You're peddling a self-serving well worn narrative and you're darned if you're going look at anything that challenges it.
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  13. The average age of a UK covid death still remains at nearly two years higher than an average UK death. 83 as opposed to 81. 7m on the NHS waiting list (up from 4m pre-covid), at the very least tens of thousands who will die who might otherwise lived, hundreds of billions spunked on furlough and propping up zombie companies, hundreds of thousands of once viable business sent to the wall, millions of kids deprived of the education, usual socialisation behaviour that enforces herd immunity against a range of diseases shut down, millions of predominantly poorer essential workers forced to go to work anyway... This list of shame just goes on and on. 'Saving Lives'? My @rse.
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  14. Jimmy Carter's Democrats set in place many overdue unpopular economic and political policies the outcomes of which Reagan, like Thatcher, would later reap the rewards of. Carter was inevitably a captive of the extremely difficult time in which he was president but, just as in the UK, that difficult time was laid at the door of those in charge and went on to form the unchallengeable folklore that perpetuates to this day as to why we should never ever return to those dark days.
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  15. Trump is a totemic. 'If only people could see sense' is not really a decent political argument from Shriver. The US electorate is polarised, it's polarised for a reason and yes even a brain dead Biden or even a Democrat stuffed monkey will likely win in 2024 just to keep Trump out, but it doesn't address that polarization and sense of alienation that many Republican US voters feel.
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