The Political Thread

[IndigoPrime]

Smart piece over at Politics.co.cuk, arguing that COVID unity is over, and people are retreating into camps. They talk about three groups: the trusting, the dissenting, and the frustrated. And, yep, they map to Con/Lab and Leave/Remain.

Culture war FT... L.

[The Mind of Wolfie Smith]

'it might be worth asking why black people are still protesting when they're at higher risk than you are'

It's probably courteous not to assume anything about anyone's ethnicity or identity. Thanks.

And the vast majority of those protesting are clearly not at significant risk. However, as potentially asymptomatic carriers they now represent a lethal risk to many of the vulnerable, ill, disabled and elderly within their communities (aside from those protestors who are subsequently entirely quarantining for x number of weeks).

[Jim_Campbell]

Smart piece over at Politics.co.cuk, arguing that COVID unity is over, and people are retreating into camps. They talk about three groups: the trusting, the dissenting, and the frustrated. And, yep, they map to Con/Lab and Leave/Remain.

Culture war FT... L.

This going to be it now. Ian Dunt made a perfectly sensible tweet about the Colston thing and was immediately accused of "pandering to the Remain crowd". Every damn thing the Tories and the right don't like people complaining about will be labelled "Remoaner discontent" and dismissed. The clamour for Cummings' head was instantly factionalised as "Remoaner revenge for Brexit" or "an attempt to sabotage Brexit".

You wouldn't think that they won. It's done. It's happened. The democratic mandate of the referendum (contentious as that might be), the 'will of the people' has been discharged.

We're never going to hear the end of it. For the Brexiteers, this is their Battle of Britain, their 1966 World Cup and they won't let it go.

[sheridan]

'it might be worth asking why black people are still protesting when they're at higher risk than you are'

It's probably courteous not to assume anything about anyone's ethnicity or identity. Thanks.

That jumped out at me as well - also comparing black people in general with somebody who has already declared they have a condition which leaves them at considerable risk.  Even if Wolfie Smith is white, black people are only more likely than the average white person, not a white person with one of the conditions listed on the guidance. 

I'll make this about myself to avoid stepping on anybody else's toes (also I know what ethnicity and conditions I have).
As I also have one of the conditions on the list, I'm both more susceptible to catching COVID than somebody who doesn't have my condition, and more likely to die if I do catch it.  A black person in the same high-risk group would (according to what we can ascertain at the moment) be more vulnerable than me, all else being equal.  I - white and in high-risk group - am more vulnerable than the average black person not in the high-risk group, who themselves are more vulnerable than the average white person not in a high-risk group.

[Funt Solo]

Muddy waters.

Arguably, there are two public health crises: the Covid thing, and the racism thing. In the US, it's patently clear that a militarized police force that was born in the slave trade (see: Runaway Slave Patrols) has a modern tendency to kill black suspects first, and get away with it later. The argument that it's not happening in the UK is debunked in a recent Gruniad article: "Systemic racism and police brutality are British problems too".

There's certainly a dilemma for many people: protest in a group setting or maintain careful distancing? I just don't know how one could reach a sensible position in suggesting that people shouldn't protest. Most of the time, the status quo prevails: entrenched racism persists because it has a foothold.

The idea (I assume) of the protest movement is to change things when there's a will for change: and you can only get it done now, while it's raw. You can't say "Well, Covid, so if you could all just contain your anger and frustration at the murder of a black suspect in a $20 unproven fraud case by four police officers and save it up for ... a year or so. I double-promise that we'll think about looking into things then."

Ultimately, if anyone's angry about the protests, the blame lies with the government. They could provide strong leadership and a determination to change the system and to root out systemic racism. Have they? Not in the US: Trump tear-gassed peaceful protesters and waved a bible. He thinks white supremacists are "very fine people". Not in the UK: Boris and Co. reckon that statue of the slaver should have stayed up and that democratic channels should be used to "address concerns". (But that had already been tried.) Priti Patel says there's no problem with the police in this country.

Save your fury at the protesters for your elected government: they support the status quo. Which means, in effect, that they support the death of George Floyd. (Trump went so far as to say the murdered man would be pleased about how things were going down on earth from an imagined perch in an imagined heaven. Jesus wept!)

[Professor Bear]

a militarized police force that was born in the slave trade (see: Runaway Slave Patrols) has a modern tendency to kill black suspects first, and get away with it later.

I wasn't aware until recently that some of the earliest police forces in the US were slave patrols and that part of their job was terrorising black people who weren't slaves.  One of the first things that struck me after that was that cops in the US still call themselves "patrolmen" - when I looked it up, the phrase is considered to have originated in North America.  African American fathers are expected to give their children "the talk" at some point, in which it is explained how they never argue with patrolmen, they always do what they're told by patrolmen, they never talk back, they never give them any excuse, and at what point do we start acknowledging that black communities are being terrorised by cops?

As I also have one of the conditions on the list, I'm both more susceptible to catching COVID than somebody who doesn't have my condition, and more likely to die if I do catch it.  A black person in the same high-risk group would (according to what we can ascertain at the moment) be more vulnerable than me, all else being equal.  I - white and in high-risk group - am more vulnerable than the average black person not in the high-risk group, who themselves are more vulnerable than the average white person not in a high-risk group.

I am worried we're veering into "all lives matter" territory so I apologise for poor phrasing on my part regarding any presumption of ethnicity, and for suggesting that a black person's singular concern in attending a protest would be about catching a virus.  The latter is most obviously not the case, especially in the context of the George Floyd protests, and my intent was merely to draw attention to why a particular community might feel the protests are worth the risk.

[Dandontdare]

I would also have been vociferously cheering on any tipping of slaver statues into harbours.

That statue wasn't thrown into the sea at all, it just tripped and fell

[sheridan]

I am worried we're veering into "all lives matter" territory so I apologise for poor phrasing on my part regarding any presumption of ethnicity

As that was a reply to what I said, I have no connection with "all lives matter", the EDF, BNP, National Front or any other racist organisation.  I'm not suggestion that you're accusing me of that, but as the racist trigger phrase is directly after the quote of what I said I don't want anybody to get the wrong end of the stick.

[shaolin_monkey]

Another superb 'Week in Tory' from Russ, where we learn of the jolly japes of Johnson (he likes a midday three hour snooze you know) and his ragtag bunch, as we officially hit 64,000 excess deaths to Covid19.

https://twitter.com/russincheshire/status/1270366444405096451?s=21

[JayzusB.Christ]

I would also have been vociferously cheering on any tipping of slaver statues into harbours.

That statue wasn't thrown into the sea at all, it just tripped and fell

I think you'll find it fell harder than it was pushed. Could have been a provocateur?

[sheridan]

Another superb 'Week in Tory' from Russ, where we learn of the jolly japes of Johnson (he likes a midday three hour snooze you know) and his ragtag bunch, as we officially hit 64,000 excess deaths to Covid19.

https://twitter.com/russincheshire/status/1270366444405096451?s=21

Wonder what Keir Starmer's 64,000 deaths prime-ministers-question will be?

[shaolin_monkey]

I would also have been vociferously cheering on any tipping of slaver statues into harbours.

That statue wasn't thrown into the sea at all, it just tripped and fell

I think you'll find it fell harder than it was pushed. Could have been a provocateur?

Either way, 54 protesters are resigning, because they don't like being told not to push statues over.

[Tiplodocus]

I'm currently seeing people simultaneously saying "black lives matter" while moaning that they can no longer watch LITTLE BRITAIN and COME FLY WITH ME and luagh at blokes in dresses or blacked up (or both) on streaming services.

[IndigoPrime]

I always found that show duff. At best, it was deeply problematic at the time, with a few good ideas, but far too much repetition. It felt like a third-rate and extremely smug Fast Show. But I'll give Matt Lucas his dues. A few years ago, he said he wouldn't make that show today, and was very aware of how "cruel" it was, and the various problems with what he did. He noted there was no bad intent per se, but that from a place of arrogance they showed off their range—which led to some very bad decisions.

If nothing else, the manner of modern streaming services shows how poorly a lot of comedy dates. Even a couple of decades back, we were already aware of this with Python, which was very white, totally male, and extremely sexist—albeit also inventive, clever, and witty in a certain public school way. But it's surprising how quickly Friends become quite poisonous (I couldn't stomach it after about the halfway point into the run), and that people recognised the deep-hearted issues in Big Bang Theory (which I found intolerable for all kinds of reasons). Little Britain is little more than a blip, and I don't care if it's gone. It was never especially big nor clever, and unlike Python hardly stands as required viewing even as a historical curiosity.

[The Mind of Wolfie Smith]

I'm witnessing campaigns in London to take down statues of both Horatio Nelson and Nelson Mandela. I personally would agree with the former being toppled but obviously not the latter - it is becoming clear though that this isn't going to end anywhere good. Most statues from antiquity were of some of the very worst of history's psychopaths.

What we really need is a proper contemporary contextualising of every statue - to make it clear, for example that a previous age's veneration, was wrong, is no longer shared, and why.

In Hungary, where statues of card-carrying fascists and war criminals have been springing up all over the place during Orban's viktatorship, there is an excellent park on the edge of Budapest that I would urge everyone to consider visiting. Rather than destroy all the many dozens of statues erected during the Communist decades saved, during the peaceful revolution 30 years ago these statues were saved and repositioned in this windswept park. They are giant vulgar homages to Communist might and muscle, and are of zero artistic merit. Seen together, however, with contextualising, they are intriguing, fascinating and grotesque. Meanwhile, in downtown Budapest, more profound and gentler statues and sculptures erected to mark the city's appaling time at the very epicentre of the Holocaust are still routinely vandalised and desecrated by the far-right. And so it goes.