UK General Election Tomorrow: ME/CFS Thoughts?

[V99]

We owe the money to ourselves. Taxes will raise, spending will fall, and ME patient will win out. That's my prediction.

 

[Mark]

China buys loads of Americas

This is all terribly confusing. How many Americas are there?

 

[Mark]

Definatly not aliens.

Definitely.

How do you know these things?! I would like to see the evidence please.

Whoever owns us, surely we ought to know?

 

[flybro]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100507/sc_nm/us_britain_election_science

i picked this up from an earlier post.

The departure from parliament of Dr Evan Harris, a family doctor and science spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, prompted a string of tributes and immediately sparked an online campaign to get him re-elected.
"We have so few members of parliament who are knowledgeable about science and medicine -- losing any is bad, but losing one with Evan's flair, charm and charisma is a disaster," said Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry, Kings College London.

I cant help it, but if weasle is sad about this, then i am happy about it.

Now is this irational subjectivity on my behalf, or rational and objective?

 

[Esther12]

This is all terribly confusing. How many Americas are there?

...

Definitely.

How do you know these things?! I would like to see the evidence please.

Whoever owns us, surely we ought to know?

Jeez mark - you can't pick up these slips - I told you I was dyslexic!

America's...

 

[Mark]

Off Topic: Punctuation and Accuracy

Sorry Esther12, I'm a nitpicker I admit, and in this case I found the idea that China was buying lots and lots of Americas an amusing new conspiracy theory that people might enjoy - there are people over here who have claimed that America doesn't really exist and it's all done with video projections when you're drugged on the plane; America is really hidden somewhere in Wales, apparently. :tear: So while we were on conspiracy theories, I thought a brand new barmy one might amuse somebody. Misjudged, perhaps. I wasn't meaning to have a go - but figured your thick skin would serve you well.

You see how easily these things get started? A misplaced comma here, a dodgy use of an apostrophe, and suddenly China is buying up multiple Americas and confusion reigns!

Regular posters with dyslexia and/or brain fog really shouldn't take this to heart because the spirit of their contributions remains vitally important and I am very rare in being so obsessive about such things, but always and everywhere it causes me some confusion when posts contain such errors, they take longer to process and sometimes provoke interesting but unhelpful ideas.

eg at work an email with title: "Anyone sedn this message?"

Was that supposed to be "seen" or "send"? Time wasted pondering that...

When I spot these things, my instinct is always to correct the tiny, tiny errors, especially if they are brilliant pieces of work that deserve to be perfected. I often want to helpfully edit people's posts for grammar and punctuation because it would be really easy to do as I go along and would take our quality even higher. Could do it, but it would be a bit rude...

Anyway, I'm not in the least saying we all have to be perfect, or check every post we make rigorously, I make mistakes myself when I'm posting in a hurry, so I'm not claiming to be perfect. But however trivial it may seem, I do suspect that apparently insignificant errors can turn out to be important. As with people with ME/CFS, and the general principle that "the stone that the builders rejected as worthless turned out to be the most important of all"...

 

[Mark]

Back to the topic of discussion, since this election is clearly going to last a good while longer...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20100507/sc_nm/us_britain_election_science
i picked this up from an earlier post.

Nicely done! I nearly did the same myself, it's so beautful. I'm all for more science in parliament, but good science is much preferred! Another one to add to the list of good bits of news, alongside the Rantzen crash.

Things aren't looking too bad at the moment on the election front - surely to goodness Clegg is just stringing us all along? If he did sign up with the Tories, that would be the end of the Lib Dems. It's a terrifying prospect. Surely, surely not...

Electoral reform has to be the fundamental issue, and the Tories simply can't prove they are capable of governing in the national interest, because they are not. Surely, surely, surely?

Keep us hanging as long as you like, Nick, but ffs don't drop the ball in the end.

 

[Adam]

Investors.

If you've got a pension, governments will owe your pension fund money, etc, etc. Different governments will also invest in each others debt (China buys loads of Americas, lots of oil states are big investors in government debt too).

Definatly not aliens.

We owe the money to ourselves?

This gets curiouser and curioser.

 

[natasa778]

LibDem Evan Harris gone - GOOD RIDDANCE !!!!!

I cant help it, but if weasle is sad about this, then i am happy about it.

I was dancing a happy dance when I heard that he had lost his seat. He was the only reason I did not vote LibDem (although I always did in the past) - I just could not get over the thought that this guy could get close to DoH if they won.

He was very active in the whole GMC-hounding of Dr Wakefield and stood outside the building on the finding-of-facts day BOOING parents of severly sick children! The guy is an unbelievably sleezy slimey character. Later appeared on the telly (he always does - just HOW do these guys get into the media) throwing same old same old lies and propaganda against a medical model of autism and potential risks of vaccines. Even had a section on his website boasting about how those crazy parents are finally proved wrong etc bla bla vomit

He really is one of the staunch defenders of the current medical dogma and it is VERY good news indeed for CFS/ME and humankind in general that he is gone.


Btw it is really "interesting" that the weasel is on his side, isn't it.

 

[Esther12]

Sorry Esther12

I was only playing too Mark. No worries.

The drama's continuing - I expect they're all feverishly negotiating over how different coalition governments will deal with the scandalous way CFS has been treated in the past.

edit - from what I've seen of Evan Harris, he seemed good.

 

[Mark]

I am very conflicted about Evan Harris, I've watched him on TV today and he seemed very good, very relaxed and said a lot of very good things. I didn't know anything about his involvement re: Wakefield but clearly he believed what he was doing was right, and I don't jump to any conclusions about exactly who he was booing. He didn't seem too distressed to be out of office.

I have a very close friend who knows him well, and she was distraught that he had not been elected. I will be discussing it with her soon, but I would just like to say now that I think with all these people from the 'bad science' side of things, my feeling is that they simply have a tiny blind spot that leads them to make huge errors - from our point of view as patients. I'm sure they feel they same way about us. I have not given up hope that we can eventually sort these differences out and all shake hands. The truth about Wakefield has to come out eventually. And just because Simon Wessely is first to defend him, doesn't mean he is his friend. Perhaps a case of "with friends like that..."?

It's like two sides of a coin arguing about whether the coin is heads or tails. Ridiculous, really.

Anyone know anything about the one seat that still hasn't declared?

 

[Mark]

We owe the money to ourselves?

This gets curiouser and curioser.

To the future (!).

Physics work I've read about recently seems to be gradually coming round to the idea that events from the future really can influence events in the present as well as events in the past doing so. It always seemed obvious to me, but they do seem to be getting there...slowly...

 

[flybro]

I am very conflicted about Evan Harris, I've watched him on TV today and he seemed very good, very relaxed and said a lot of very good things. I didn't know anything about his involvement re: Wakefield but clearly he believed what he was doing was right, and I don't jump to any conclusions about exactly who he was booing. He didn't seem too distressed to be out of office.

I have a very close friend who knows him well, and she was distraught that he had not been elected. I will be discussing it with her soon, but I would just like to say now that I think with all these people from the 'bad science' side of things, my feeling is that they simply have a tiny blind spot that leads them to make huge errors - from our point of view as patients. I'm sure they feel they same way about us. I have not given up hope that we can eventually sort these differences out and all shake hands. The truth about Wakefield has to come out eventually. And just because Simon Wessely is first to defend him, doesn't mean he is his friend. Perhaps a case of "with friends like that..."?

It's like two sides of a coin arguing about whether the coin is heads or tails. Ridiculous, really.

Anyone know anything about the one seat that still hasn't declared?

i agree Mark, ya big grown-up ya.

i suppose its not his fault weasle defended him

i'll try hard NOT to channel flip if he comes on again, unless he says, 'chronically unwell',

if he says that i'm going to poke him in the eye with a war head.

 

[natasa778]

Bad Science Ben Goldacre calling for Evan Harris to return to parliament...

http://www.badscience.net/2010/05/keep-evan-harris-in-parliament-oxford-west-and-abingdon/

 

[natasa778]

I've created a new thread on evan...

 

[jace]

The slightly incomplete, but good enough for my purposes, election analysis from Wikipedia

______________Conservative________Labour_____________Liberal
Last election ____198 seats, 32.3%___ 356 seats, 35.3%___ 62 seats, 22.1%
Seats before____ 209________________349________________ 63
Seats won ______305_______________ 258______________ 57
Seat change____ +96______________ −91_______________ −6
Popular vote____ 10,683,787__________ 8,604,358_________ 6,827,938
Percentage_____ 36.1%_____________ 29.0%____________ 23.0%
Swing_____ ____+3.8%_____________ −6.2%____________ +1.0%

So Labour and Liberal combined got 52% of the vote
The Liberals lost 6 seats despite overall share of the vote increasing by 1.0%
In the last Parliament, Labour's 35.3% share gave them a massive majority.

Our system is broken. We need a fairer voting system that produces a lower house that is representative of the wishes of the majority. The Liberals would have a much fairer representation in the house with either PR or single transferrable vote.

Guess that's why we still have the old, tired, besmirched first past the post system. The old two party system still has us in it's boney grip.

 

[jace]

The slightly incomplete, but good enough for my purposes, election analysis from Wikipedia

______________Conservative________Labour_____________Liberal
Last election ____198 seats, 32.3%___ 356 seats, 35.3%___ 62 seats, 22.1%
Seats before____ 209________________349________________ 63
Seats won ______305_______________ 258______________ 57
Seat change____ +96______________ −91_______________ −6
Popular vote____ 10,683,787__________ 8,604,358_________ 6,827,938
Percentage_____ 36.1%_____________ 29.0%____________ 23.0%
Swing_____ ____+3.8%_____________ −6.2%____________ +1.0%

So Labour and Liberal combined got 52% of the vote
The Liberals lost 6 seats despite overall share of the vote increasing by 1.0%
In the last Parliament, Labour's 35.3% share gave them a massive majority.

Our system is broken. We need a fairer voting system that produces a lower house that is representative of the wishes of the majority. The Liberals would have a much fairer representation in the house with either PR or single transferrable vote.

Guess that's why we still have the old, tired, besmirched first past the post system. The old two party system still has us in its boney grip.

 

[Mark]

Our system is broken. We need a fairer voting system that produces a lower house that is representative of the wishes of the majority. The Liberals would have a much fairer representation in the house with either PR or single transferrable vote.

Guess that's why we still have the old, tired, besmirched first past the post system. The old two party system still has us in its boney grip.

Agreed Jace. Divide and rule seems alive and well.

The 52% of the popular vote is a key point. Everywhere else - even Labour - focus on the number of seats. But the percentage majority should have been key. The newspaper coverage is appalling, just spreading fear, echoed back by the people. They want a strong, stable government to rule over them, because the papers say all this talking is 'shabby'. How short memories from the days when we were all fed up with politicians playing ping-pong and wanted them to co-operate.

And just now I see Evan Harris is backing the Tories, in the interests of strong stable government.

The killer part I didn't see coming was when Labour themselves all decided to fall on their swords, preferring to wait for another chance to dominate rather than co-operate. Brown comes out with a lot of credit in the end, but his sacrifce seems to have merely encouraged the rest of his party to follow suit. Labour really come out of the latest events with no credit whatsoever in my eyes. They seem to have quickly decided they are incapable of co-operating, and prefer to wait for another chance. They will be loathed north of the border for letting the Tories in, loathed by everyone who wanted them to co-operate.

All very depressing. That's what you get when you try to be too reasonable I suppose.

Extracts from New Scientist the week before the election, with headline "The Maths Of Democracy: Why Fairness Is Impossible". What a positive message to push out...

Mathematicians have turned up many paradoxes and surprises when looking for a "free and fair" electoral system, it explains. "What they have not done is come up with the answer, with good reason: it probably doesn't exist."

Note 'probably'.

One example you may be aware of is the scenario where 3 voters rank 3 candidates A-B-C, B-C-A, C-A-B. By 2 to 1, voters prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. The Dodo concludes: "Everybody has won and all must have prizes."

Seems strange to me that this is considered a paradox and a problem...

Anyway all this will run on and on, with a Labour leadership election to come, some kind of referendum, all of which the papers will presumably tell us is not what we want, and that will be lapped up as usual.

Ah well, interesting times...

 

[OverTheHills]

I've started a new thread called "UK General Election: Urgent! Time to remind Nick Clegg about ME!" - because it seems to me that there is a real opportunity to lobby Nick now he is deputy PM, and try to get some political change in the UK. Anyone interested in helping?

OTH