Why Dunciad.com?
It’s a cool domain name and it was available. Yes, I know. Available. Crazy, isn’t it?
Really?
Yes. It also helps that it’s also my favourite satire written by Alexander Pope, one of the most metrically pure English poets who also knew his way around a crude insult or two. If you’ve not read it, you should give it a try.
So this is satire, right?
Can’t deny it. There will be some. But it’s also an experiment in writing and drawing, giving work away for free in order to see how many people are willing to support a writer doing his thing. It’s the weird stuff that I wouldn’t get published elsewhere in this word of diminishing demands and cookie-cutter tastes.
I’ll give him one thing, he was right about the 10pm restriction being a PR stunt. Apparently zero scientific or behavioural rationale behind it, heaven forbid people get the idea to go out earlier to get some serious drinking in or to go on to house parties afterwards. Perhaps if they had actually enforced the existing rules around pubs in the first place…….
Apparently this measure is on the back of the province of Antwerp in Belgium having introduced a curfew in July that seemed to work in cooling a rise in cases. Difference is, that was an actual curfew, nobody was allowed out of their homes between 11.30pm and 6am.
Nasty Sociopathic Wurzel could actually be the name of a real ale.
If only you know how long I spent studying the names of real speciality ales in order to come up with that one.
I’m sure he is occasionally right but apart from this being a drawing challenge, I can’t stand the man. Not so much what he says but the way he injects himself into the debate. I’d say the same about people on the other side of the culture war who do the same thing (that builder, for example, with his bollock to Brexit sign). Besides, our town has spiked to one of the highest in the country specifically because of an infection in the local Weatherspoons, which I understand had had to close down for a “deep cleanse” (which always sounds a bit like a colonoic).
I also agree. Anybody who thinks a 10pm close is going to stop northerners from drinking clearly doesn’t know northerners. They recently put Lancashire into lockdown but left Blackpool open. Sort of predictable what happened next. Blackpool suddenly reports biggest ever crowds and police beg people to stop travelling there. Madness.
The Antwerp story is interesting. It’s why I feel a mite sorry for Johnson. The science is obvious. The solutions clear. It’s just they don’t translate into politics that he can delivery. So much reminded me of Trump as he stood in the Commons yesterday praising people for flouting the rules he himself imposed on them.
I think the real pickle now comes from the fact that it has been proven that the antibodies are short lived and do not confer long term protection from the virus. That begins to put the virus into the realms of a deadlier flu. If we don’t see it suddenly disappear by next summer in the same way that SARS did, it becomes a case of living with virus and managing risk especially given few vaccines seem to be more than 50% efficient. If that is where you happen to be leaning in your thoughts, then bringing in measures that may destroy the economy in the process start to lose their appeal very quickly, even if they do have the support of a majority of the public. They may support you now, but they will damn you later. What I think is very clear is that nobody out there has any radical solutions of how to proceed. It seems a case of looking at what your neighbours are doing and copying them, which is why we track France and Spain with a two week lag.
I genuinely think the “problem” is that politicians (and even more acutely pundits — of which I hope I’m not one) won’t leave the scientists alone. Every day I read yet another article which amounts to overreach, usually by the right, to justify their ideological position. Most are usually pseudoscience being pushed as “the answer” when what we need to do is allow the experts the time and space to attack the problem. I believe we will have a vaccine, which might require booster shots to achieve efficacy. We might also see the natural life cycle of the virus emerge, in which which it mutates into a more transmittable but less potent strain (the usual path, from what I understand). I find the science fascinating, enlightening, and even uplifting. I just find the politics woeful and, in fact, rather pathetic. I could launch into a whole argument here about the way that pundits tend to emerge from the social or liberal arts, rather than sciences, but I really hate the argument that science cannot understand our human/spiritual/emotional lives. It’s the same argument that has atheism as not providing any ethical answers to life. They’re made by people who understand neither science nor atheism. I always find it helpful that you keep reminding me that 50%+ of people have been sensible in this crisis. It’s so easy to get distracted by the idiots.