The Toxic Avenger

I think your inevitable ducking of my challenge has just demonstrated why I'm right: I "can win" and did win, and now you look foolish, as well as a nutter.

Interesting. I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse. If you can work your way through my quote above and come up with any evidence to support your characterisation of my position as 'only covid matters,' then I shall back down, declare you sane and crown you as the rightful victor in this debate. I have absolutely no idea how you're going to deal with "I'll always do the same if I've got any reason to believe I've got any type of lurgy" and "some other guys who have good reason not to want to be picking up any type of lurgy" but you've clearly got a fertile imagination and always display the Dunkirk spirit when faced with an unwinnable argument, so fly my pretty! (If you can't find said evidence, on the other hand, you're going to look a bit foolish as well as a nutter.)

Fair enough Barry. Here's my original comment, with your response. The reader can decide whether you're a nutter:

You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't here Barry. You were never going to be able to provide a convincing response to the first paragraph of my second-to-last post to you, but the 'look squirrel!' tactic you're now trying to employ won't cut it. You were kicking up a fuss about people choosing to check whether their particular post-Glastonbury lurgy happened to be COVID, and as a result you're recruiting more members to 'Club Barry is a Nutter.'

For reasons of personal safety, it's probably best if you don't keep pointing out what a weirdo I am for wasting my time on an internet forum sock puppet. We may end up giving ourselves whiplash from nodding at each other in furious agreement. My weirdo status has now been firmly established, and I'm going to have to learn to come to terms with it. However, you seem to be in denial about your internet conspiracist nutter status. Everybody that reads your posts will be thinking the same thing, and you're welcome to try and argue your case, but to do so you'll really need to go back and tackle the first paragraph of my previous reply to you...

I think you already know you can't win on this one. I've repeatedly told you that I haven't taken a COVID test post-Glastonbury, and in fact stopped doing them at all as soon as my work stopped requiring it. I've also repeatedly pointed out that I don't just 'crack on' if I'm feeling poorly - this was the entire point of my first post: I had a doubt about my health post-Glastonbury, so showed a bit of consideration to a couple of vulnerable guys and let them choose how in-their-face I got. All this was done without any need for a test, and I'll always do the same if I've got any reason to believe I've got any type of lurgy. By telling everyone they've tested positive post-Glastonbury, the guys on this thread have reduced the chance of me inadvertently passing it on to some other guys who have good reason not to want to be picking up any type of lurgy: it was a reminder to me that my croaking might be more than just the result of a week of shouting/drinking/not sleeping etc. Taking a test doesn't do anyone any harm, and you betray yourself as the nutter you are for opposing anyone who decides to. (You're bang on the money about the sadness of me having a sock puppet account. I did enjoy using it to repeatedly downvote one of the old forum 'characters' who used to do exactly the same thing to others, yet was hilariously touchy if anyone did it to him. The fact that I spent my time doing this is a genuine embarrassment to me, and clear evidence of a character/lifestyle flaw - which I'm trying to work on, but leopards/spots etc. The reason I've inadvertently resurrected this long-dead account recently is that the forum login seems to have changed whereby you have to enter your email address, rather than your username, and I occasionally forget which one I used for which.)

Guilty as charged - I'm clearly not the sharpest pencil in the box, as I've accidentally logged in using the sock puppet account that I created to annoy 'StuMalinas' many years ago

Thanks Chicken Bob - confirmed my suspicion that you're a nutter, like Barry. As I've already pointed out to Barry a couple of posts back: I didn't have any 'stupid black line on a plastic stick' for the simple reason that I haven't taken a test. All that happened was I warned two vulnerable people that there was a possibility that my croaking might be related to reports of infections after Glastonbury, and they opted to sit me at the far end of the table yesterday. I was happy to show them that courtesy, but I understand you'd have been coughing direct in their faces as a protest against Bill Gates killing Lady Di in order to inject us all with 5G virus as part of the 'great reset' etc etc.

That's very accommodating of you. Even though you, like me, find that word offensive, you 'understand the sentiment' when somebody is called a c**t for expressing their personal preference for weather. The reason you can't see the in-group/out-group stuff is that you're involved in it - go back through the thread and look at how many condescending comments you've made to Fuzzy Dunlop. I'm not saying that you didn't mean these things in jest, but context is everything - when someone's getting unfair grief from rent-a-mob then you need to think carefully about whether your contribution is helping. If people like danbailey and Jose Pose didn't exist, then we could have nice things - i.e. a proper fun rain-haters v. heat-haters knockabout. But when morons exist who actually want to attempt to bully someone for expressing their personal weather preference, we really ought to focus on telling them to f**k off.

On page 149 of this thread, you were called a c**t. The guy who called you a c**t was 'playing to the gallery,' i.e. the cowardly tactic of saying what you think will go down well with your audience. He wasn't wrong: 5 forum regulars decided this was worthy of a thumbs-up. It wasn't until he was called out on this that he backtracked with his Jeremy Clarkson 'it was only a joke' defence. I'm genuinely pleased you don't feel bullied in this thread, but some of us spectators are finding the in-group/out-group bullshit a bit unpleasant. The NFR NFC thing was born over a decade ago when some of then then-regulars of this forum were having a laugh knowingly portraying themselves as superstitious maniacs, i.e. it was self-deprecating humour. Unfortunately, this throwaway line was turned into a deeply non-funny long-running trope, which attracted the genuinely hard-of-thinking who actually believe that one person's preferences for weather can actually be deemed selfish and punishable. In years gone by the NFR NFC bullshit net was spread even wider: all of us using the 'science thread' (which is what this thread was referred to as) were called c**ts, and the current regular that did this was proudly unrepentant, even after being called out.

Well that's something positive to hang onto I guess, because you sound like a complete c**t.

Thanks for doing this - at the moment, it could just be a cruel taste of 'what the weather could have been' but it's always exciting to see footage from the site build-up.

Thanks - well spotted. So no Nightingales, but any chance to see Stewart Lee is not to be missed for us self-loathing Guardian readers.

For those interested in such things, the fact that 'King Rocker' is down as a Q&A opens the possibility that Stewart Lee and/or The Nightingales might be at Glastonbury this year.

And this is where you earn your Daily Mail populist label Barry. Now try and silence your internal monologue about the loony left, political correctness gone mad, virtue-signalling, social media-obsessed youngsters etc. and try and come to this discussion with a clean sheet. The simple facts are simple and unequivocal: vegetarians/vegans have only made a personal decision on what they will and won't eat. Being vegan/vegetarian doesn't require you to avoid shops that sell animal products or sites where it's produced. There's no hypocrisy involved in going to Glastonbury. If you want a thread on virtue signalling etc. - start one.

In the 'Barry Fish modern populist dictionary,' it may well be the definition of hypocrisy, and the Daily Mail would love to convince us of that, but it isn't. Being a vegetarian means you don't eat animals. Being a vegan means you don't eat animal-based foodstuffs. That's it: there's no swearing-in ceremony where they commit to not visiting dairy farms - they just don't eat the produce of those places. It would be near-impossible for any person in the UK to live a life where they don't frequent businesses which are part of the meat/dairy food-chain, and to demand that they do is really just a sly attack on them. A bit of help with definitions for you though Barry: if someone announced: 'nobody should visit dairy farms on religious/animal cruelty/environmental/whatever grounds,' but then visited Glastonbury, that would be hypocrisy. You'd first need to find the people who've made such an announcement before you could inform them they were hypocrites though, and I think you'll have slim pickings there.

If you think about the question that started this thread, it's a bit dodgy, no? It's based on a dubious premise, i.e. that anyone who takes a moral decision can be condemned as a hypocrite if they don't scrupulously maintain that moral standard in every aspect of their lives. Exactly the same dubious premise was used by the right wing press and internet echo chambers to attack climate change protesters who travelled to COP26 in Glasgow by anything other than bare feet. The 'virtue-signalling hypocrite' label is one of the main tactics being employed by those with a vested interest in promoting climate change scepticism. It's effectively demanding that anyone who tries to do the right thing must live a puritanical life (which is pretty much impossible in a modern western economy) or face the scorn of the Daily Mail and the moronic masses of populist social media.