love* in the time of plague (and by love* i mean brexit* and other dreary matters of uk politics)

someone said if domcum goes, BJ will have to deal with a load of resignations. who will resign? domcum's staff or cabinet ministers?

5D chess is nonsense bc it suggests a level of control and order which is impossible. this is just 'flooding the zone with shit', in keeping w/ the disruptive agent of chaos modus operandi that has characterised this wing of the right.

Pretty obvious that Johnson doesn't think Cummings leaving the government is a minor distraction.

that strategy doesn't usually call for the shit to be yr own suicide, but xp

i’d venture a guess that the economic consequences of many millions of people out of work will be more severe, and more transformative long-term(for better or for worse) than anyone is yet grasping. it’s absolutely massive and the characteristics of this virus mean no quick solutions. this government is absolutely not up to the challenge. a scandal of this size and shape will look, in retrospect, like a day out at, er barnard castle.

TS: 'flooding the zone with shit' vs. 5D chess

5D chess but all the dimensions are indistinguishable from shit

someone said if domcum goes, BJ will have to deal with a load of resignations. who will resign? domcum's staff or cabinet ministers?

it's the birthday present from me to you

Btw I agree with the theory I saw earlier on twitter, which is that this whole thing has fucked what most of us assume is the government’s intention to shift the blame to the public.

Gove will tie himself in knots trying to decide whether to go. Obviously if he goes before DC he cuts off someone he has really put his neck out for and looks like a moron. But if he goes after, he looks pro-DC and has the country hate him more — sacking DC would be a popular move right now. I think he'll stay.

and yeah, any blame at all that could have landed on the public goes straight to DC now

he's a wrecking machine

Yes, Dominic Cummings specifically will be blamed for it and the government after that. It still makes him a human shield.

They don't even need to flood the zone with shit in order to keep the death toll off the front pages, the death toll has been off the front pages for weeks now. They could just drop SHOPS OPEN YAY type announcements for weeks and most of the press would happily play ball.

he's been caught out, has reasoned he doesn't need to fall on his sword & can further aggravate the media and help johnson spend less time talking about tens of thousands of deaths while also acting as a pressure valve for public anger. the most important public feeling is apathy, and the main tactics to increase it are division and delay. lots of ppl are sick of lockdown already and the intensity of feeling is likely to gradually fizzle out over time with the risk coming from spikes if particular issues emerge around which public sentiment galvanises. if during the peak of the crisis public anger is focused on trying to get one person to resign then that's not too bad for the govt considering how appalling their handling has been, it is at least something they are in control of

Their own failure at handling this has fucked them, though, and shops opening isn’t going to make people forget that? How many of us here know people bereaved who couldn’t attend their loved ones’ funerals? I know several people. The numbers I know who were actually sick with this horrible thing were higher.

So many social posts angry about being able to visit Primark before family.

Yeah, not saying the cunts won’t get away with this, but this has spread too far and affected too many people who have been enduring it for the common good they were told we are all working towards.

when you can't keep people happy you focus on managing their anger

Yes I'm not saying that easing lockdown measures will distract from the Cummings thing, that's taken on a life of its own that they can't control. But prior to that they had been distracting from the death toll for some time with reasonable success, in the press at least.

PREM FOOTBALL IN JULY pages 1-3, another 150 dead tucked away on page nine, that sort of thing.

It's also possible that Cummings just lacks the self awareness to adequately manage the anger when he himself is the story.

they can fire cummings whenever they want

they don't want to, and that's what's damaging them

It's also not clear that Johnson thinks he can fire him and maintain control of the cabinet.

managing anger medium-term requires a management of the pandemic and of the economy tho, it can't just be not bothering but saying we did -- both of them have real-world impact on many many ppl even if the bbc is not talking about it, and that disparity is what's currently not being "managed" and has now (i suspect) slipped off into the unmanageable

being able to fire cummings is still a degree of control, which they wouldn't have over a lot of other things the public could be writing letters to their MPs about atm. johnson might personally be in poor health and not feeling up to managing the cabinet but while I seem to think cummings is more effective than a lot of ppl, no player is bigger than the club esp w/ the tories, and even if johnson loses control of the cabinet it doesn't benefit anyone good

Mark OTM. Also they are looking less and less like get-shit-done types by the day and this episode has only exacerbated that.

Question is whether they're keeping Cummings on out of dependency, expediency or fear.

whether he eventually gets sacrificed or not the longer this goes on the less time the uk death toll is in the headlines

You say this like anyone gave a fuck when the UK death toll was in the headlines - people didn't, it was succesfully diverted on to "wankers going out to the park, grr" type feelings. Now thanks to the Cummings thing that's pretty much gone and tons of people who were previously apathetic or giving the government the benefit of the doubt are actively angry.

The daily death toll has been going down for some time and it's becoming less newsworthy in any case with a few exceptions like care homes. Question is what happens if it starts going up again an, as others have pointed out, we're reaching the point where VE Day and subsequent relaxation of the lockdown might start having a noticeable effect on that.

yeah the death toll in itself is too gradual and slow-building to cause a crisis by itself, but the underlying suffering makes it if not inevitable then at least v likely that public anger wld coalesce around something/s sooner or later, as part of a collective display of grief and so on. the state is much better at nudging/fabricating public outpourings than it is at dealing with pandemics

As has been said on this thread, I think the govt's reasoning until now was that the anger would coalesce around having us turn on each other. And that seemed to be working fine.

still a lot of boot-throaters on my facebook feed saying 'well philip schofield broke lockdown and he got to keep his job' and comparing the very unfair media treatment of poor wee domcum to caroline flack

xp that's always their first choice

still a lot of boot-throaters on my facebook feed saying 'well philip schofield broke lockdown and he got to keep his job' and comparing the very unfair media treatment of poor wee domcum to caroline flack

I've seen a grand total of one person supporting Cummings on FB, one of those Rangers supporting fat bald mods my sister knows... Actually there was one more guy, who was not quite supporting him but using it as an excuse to attack the hypocrisy of the SNP, I go to his homepage and there he is standing in Ibrox Park with the scarf on. These guys are just born trolls, it's almost like they can't help themselves.

Also, to hazard a guess, much of the conversation in this country is currently happening on WhatsApp groups, including with family members people can't see. They'll be absolutely full of ranting and grumbling and sharing stupid anti-Cummings memes and the government has little to no visibility over them. The way that influence and sentiment evolve and spread in that kind of ecosystem in a lockdown is new and it's difficult even for galaxy brained data gods to know how that's going to play out.

Oh for the days of the giant lasagne.

a friend well-versed in such things pointed out that focus groups are currently more or less impossible

the right has generally done p well in arenas with lowest common denominator, unedited viral/meme content on social media, it's one of the reasons for the pivot to flooding, it plays on all sorts of cheap feelings while also lowering trust

Lol can’t believe I’m going to watch the daily briefing again but here we are. It’s a good thing our tv is on its last legs in case Pesto appears again.

it might just expire in frustration like the rest of us

gaslighting fucks. You only need to review fines if something has changed – and the whole argument is that DC was within the law at the time

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52797859

This'll be an interesting test of how far Johnson can stand up to the lunatic fringe in his party, and the US.

I guess the good news is that there'll be fewer 5G masts for people to set fire to.

Peston trying out a short question, but with no follow-up he's sunk

Montie says another government resignation tonight

boris is gonna resign

Junior Minister for Paper Clips and Office Requisitions no doubt.

he's still dead

lol a survey conducted in scotland before the cummings story broke puts sturgeon 50 points ahead of johnson for people thinking she’s done a good job in handling the ‘rona

You try telling that to fat Rangers supporting mods.

Hoi that was only a childhood dalliance