Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.
Jan 6 was the start not the end and these people who think everything will be alright if Trump just has an actuarially unlikely heart attack are deluding themselves. He was just a moronic fucking boomer who stumbled on to something by accident.
The number one foreign policy goal of the British government should be to build strategic independence from the US against the day of its very ugly and chaotic disintegration.
15% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans would be happy if there was significant loss of life amongst the other side. Not much difference.
Yet, this is presented as a one-sided issue. Guess what? The Democrats try to steal elections. It might not be a raging mob outside the Capitol but they use their soft power equivalent, which is the media telling us for years post-2016 that Trump was an illegitimate President and a Russian spy, and with Hillary saying even before 2020 that the election was stolen from her. Oh, and don't fucking mention Stacey Abrams who also gets away with still claiming she won the Georgia Governor election.
If you want to genuinely solve the problem, instead of virtual signalling, then you can start by recognising this is a two sided problem, not just one.
Isn't a really crucial difference that Trump is very obviously part of the 20%, while Biden is equally obviously NOT part of the 15%? Indeed, Trump gave tacit support to a mob that wanted to hang his own VP for not being Trumpian enough, let alone Democrats.
Agree that all sides have extremists. But whereas in the Democrat Asylum, the lunatics are fairly safely locked in their padded cells, in the Republican Asylum, they are quite clearly in the manager's office, and dishing out the medication.
I also think characterising dubious campaign messages with "stealing" an election is utterly bogus - elections since the dawn of democracy have involved propoganda. That is in no way equivalent to a mob breaking into the legislature brandishing nooses.
Further, whilst the 2016 election was controversial (and clearly Clinton was unfortunate to win the popular vote but lose the election) you are totally misreporting her response. She attended Trump's inaugeration and - through gritted teeth no doubt - conceded and wished him well. She's hardly a model of the graceful loser, but it is simply untrue on your part to suggest that there isn't a vast gulf between her approach in 2016 and Trump's in 2020.
Not really for the following reasons.
First, Biden is not in control of his party, nor is Pelosi. The Squad has disproportionate - and growing - influence which is why there has been so much pushback. Biden was supposed to be a moderate for many people, not push what to many is extreme measures. He has also championed measures such as HR1, which - for all the fine language - is essentially meant to ensure a bias in the electoral system for the Democrats.
I wouldn't say the lunatics are in charge of the Republicans office. Marjorie Taylor Greene has less influence in the Republican people than AOC and Ilhan "it's all about the Benjamins, Baby" Omar does on the Democrat side. Believe it or not
I disagree with your comments about stealing the election being on a lesser pedestal. Both undermine the democratic process (and we will leave aside the obvious retort of what the BLM riots and anti-Trump riots in Washington in 2020 were doing if not a manifestation of political violence and / or an attempt to intimidate the Government). And you are wrong to say Hilary accepted 2016, she didn't - here she is 2019 claiming the election was "stolen" from her:
Mr. Phil, ages ago, Geldof did a BBC programme about slavery, and asserted it was 60% of the African economy before the British showed up.
Even allowing for exaggeration, and while accepting that more demand will increase the price, it's perhaps not the case that slavery was other than endemic even before Europeans got involved.
Indeed, the top 3 slavers over the centuries were first the Arabs in Africa, then the Portuguese in Brazil, then the British in North America and the Caribbean
I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.
Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.
Agreed. I might think differently if we were at 60% vaxxed rather than about 90% vaxxed, as the upside to the country would be very different.
What I would do is give everyone £100 vouchers per jab, also going back retrospectively, to be spent in travel or hospitality industries only valid at times when covid infection rates are not dangerously high (perhaps less than 1 in 50 in the ONS survey).
That's not a bad idea. I was thinking this morning whether there was any scope in reviving eat out to help out, but thought it probably wouldn't happen after they were bitten by (in my view coincidental) rising case numbers in the months following it last time around. This would stand in the way of the accusation that they're just driving up case rates again.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
I think the mandatory vaccination issue is both needlessly divisive, and several months too late. We now have a frequently mutating virus which, unless there is a big antigenic leap, is now potentially dangerous for the immune naive (i.e. the unvaccinated) but relatively safe for those with vaccination or prior infection. That makes vaccination, as it is for seasonal flu, much more of a question of personal risk assessment than something societal.
By all means make life a bit more hassle or expensive for those unjabbed - per Macron's approach - just as we do for smokers. But mandatory vaccinations for adults would be state overreach. And damning anti-vaxxers as "potential killers" is judgmental and intolerant.
I've been a liberal all my life, and believed we need to avoid simplistic judgments and to use persuasion ahead of force wherever possible, so it dismays me to see how many erstwhile "liberals" online seem to be intensely relaxed about various forms of state authoritarianism that would have been unthinkable only 2 years ago.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.
Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.
Agreed. I might think differently if we were at 60% vaxxed rather than about 90% vaxxed, as the upside to the country would be very different.
What I would do is give everyone £100 vouchers per jab, also going back retrospectively, to be spent in travel or hospitality industries only valid at times when covid infection rates are not dangerously high (perhaps less than 1 in 50 in the ONS survey).
That's not a bad idea. I was thinking this morning whether there was any scope in reviving eat out to help out, but thought it probably wouldn't happen after they were bitten by (in my view coincidental) rising case numbers in the months following it last time around. This would stand in the way of the accusation that they're just driving up case rates again.
Much better to keep the VAT cut and business rates abolition for a little longer.
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
I expect a large proportion are either just a bit nervous of the safety of the jab, or frightened of needles. A £50 bung would work well I expect, and be pretty cost-effective.
The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.
It happens frequently when people get sectioned.
And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.
Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
Small pox didn't appear in December 2019 from nowhere. It was around for centuries prior to the vaccine becoming available which meant that when outbreaks occurred the number of people it could effect was small (everyone else had antibodies from the previous outbreak x years earlier).
So your argument is fine for old diseases, it falls completely apart for new ones. You just haven't seen the flaws yet.
My argument has nothing to do with the severity of the illness.
Where in my post did I talk about severity of illness? Once you get to the point of creating a completely imaginary point to argue against you've lost.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
As an aside, I can recommend Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore.
I was going to link to my review, but can't find it. How peculiar. Hmm. It's a grim read. But worth it, especially for those (like me) who had/have limited knowledge of the USSR and Stalin.
I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.
The foe is the virus not its particular host.
The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.
The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.
My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.
Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
By not being vaccinated you are. These people could killers
Vaccines don’t stop infection.
Why some vaccines stop transmission & others don’t: Vaccines that stop transmission are often against viruses that replicate internally first and only then transmit (like measles). So if the vaccine stops internal replication, it stops transmission.... https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1464703819061895175
Having said that...
Comparison of infectious SARS-CoV-2 from the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.28.21268460v1 ...Here, we conducted a study involving 125 patients comprised of 72 vaccinated and 53 unvaccinated individuals, to assess the levels of infectious virus in in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Quantitative plaque assays showed no significant differences in the titers of virus between these cohorts. However, the proportion of nasopharyngeal samples with culturable virus was lower in the vaccinated patients relative to unvaccinated patients (21% vs. 40%). Finally, time-to-event analysis with Kaplan-Myer curves revealed that protection from culturable infectious virus waned significantly starting at 5 months after completing a 2-dose regimen of mRNA vaccines. These results have important implications in timing of booster dose to prevent onward transmission from breakthrough cases....
Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.
Jan 6 was the start not the end and these people who think everything will be alright if Trump just has an actuarially unlikely heart attack are deluding themselves. He was just a moronic fucking boomer who stumbled on to something by accident.
The number one foreign policy goal of the British government should be to build strategic independence from the US against the day of its very ugly and chaotic disintegration.
15% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans would be happy if there was significant loss of life amongst the other side. Not much difference.
Yet, this is presented as a one-sided issue. Guess what? The Democrats try to steal elections. It might not be a raging mob outside the Capitol but they use their soft power equivalent, which is the media telling us for years post-2016 that Trump was an illegitimate President and a Russian spy, and with Hillary saying even before 2020 that the election was stolen from her. Oh, and don't fucking mention Stacey Abrams who also gets away with still claiming she won the Georgia Governor election.
If you want to genuinely solve the problem, instead of virtual signalling, then you can start by recognising this is a two sided problem, not just one.
Isn't a really crucial difference that Trump is very obviously part of the 20%, while Biden is equally obviously NOT part of the 15%? Indeed, Trump gave tacit support to a mob that wanted to hang his own VP for not being Trumpian enough, let alone Democrats.
Agree that all sides have extremists. But whereas in the Democrat Asylum, the lunatics are fairly safely locked in their padded cells, in the Republican Asylum, they are quite clearly in the manager's office, and dishing out the medication.
I also think characterising dubious campaign messages with "stealing" an election is utterly bogus - elections since the dawn of democracy have involved propoganda. That is in no way equivalent to a mob breaking into the legislature brandishing nooses.
Further, whilst the 2016 election was controversial (and clearly Clinton was unfortunate to win the popular vote but lose the election) you are totally misreporting her response. She attended Trump's inaugeration and - through gritted teeth no doubt - conceded and wished him well. She's hardly a model of the graceful loser, but it is simply untrue on your part to suggest that there isn't a vast gulf between her approach in 2016 and Trump's in 2020.
Not really for the following reasons.
First, Biden is not in control of his party, nor is Pelosi. The Squad has disproportionate - and growing - influence which is why there has been so much pushback. Biden was supposed to be a moderate for many people, not push what to many is extreme measures. He has also championed measures such as HR1, which - for all the fine language - is essentially meant to ensure a bias in the electoral system for the Democrats.
I wouldn't say the lunatics are in charge of the Republicans office. Marjorie Taylor Greene has less influence in the Republican people than AOC and Ilhan "it's all about the Benjamins, Baby" Omar does on the Democrat side. Believe it or not
I disagree with your comments about stealing the election being on a lesser pedestal. Both undermine the democratic process (and we will leave aside the obvious retort of what the BLM riots and anti-Trump riots in Washington in 2020 were doing if not a manifestation of political violence and / or an attempt to intimidate the Government). And you are wrong to say Hilary accepted 2016, she didn't - here she is 2019 claiming the election was "stolen" from her:
To say The Squad has equivalent standing in the Democrats as Trump, or that they are as extreme is so ludicrous that it doesn't merit a response.
You can agree or disagree with reforms to make voting easier (you might legitimately disagree on the basis it potentially makes it less secure) but you cannot sensibly call it extreme.
And to post a Fox News clip of a few seconds of a Hillary Clinton Q&A event and say that proves she hasn't accepted her loss in 2016, when she attended the inaugeration, wished Trump well, and wrote a f***ing book about why she lost... well, I'd say you're better than that but all the evidence says you aren't.
Mr. Phil, ages ago, Geldof did a BBC programme about slavery, and asserted it was 60% of the African economy before the British showed up.
Even allowing for exaggeration, and while accepting that more demand will increase the price, it's perhaps not the case that slavery was other than endemic even before Europeans got involved.
Indeed, the top 3 slavers over the centuries were first the Arabs in Africa, then the Portuguese in Brazil, then the British in North America and the Caribbean
More were enslaved by Arabs than even the Roman Empire enslaved
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
"mental gymnastics"?
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
I met Piers once at a scientific conference when he was a grad student.
If I recollect, he was a very clever guy .... he was the real brains of the Corbyn family.
I think Piers subsequently had mental health problems and was not able to fulfil his academic potential or complete his PhD.
It seems likely that his railing against scientific orthodoxy (both with regard to climate change and vaccination) stems from his own disappointment at lack of a conventional scientific career.
Truth to tell, it is a sad case.
The rot set in 20 years ago when Piers became an anti-establishment weather forecaster and was briefly lauded in the press as a millionaire. Or billionaire. Or maybe trillionaire. Who cares when it's more than the average journalist will ever see and most of it is noughts anyway.
Having said this, the last time I saw him was in a restaurant in Thurso on the eve of the eclipse in 2001. He was poring over a gigantic weather chart so I sidled up to his table and asked for an expert prognosis. 'Cloudy round here, clear in the west' was the gist of his reply. Armed with this 'information' I took an exhilarating drive to Durness, chasing the sunset all the way, and was rewarded by the sight of a perfect annular eclipse at dawn the following morning.
Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.
As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.
What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?
You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.
To Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.
Oh I'm ignoring that whole Opensea Ape story - it's being going on now for over a week because people just don't understand how to perform the tasks required to 100% secure their assets. (Opensea raised $300m this week on a $3.3bn valuation btw).
What's funny is that the people who are being stolen from are clever people, it's just that this stuff is so hard to get right incredibly few people can do it.
LOL, Opensea being worth $3.5bn, is nearly as bad as Coinbase being worth $56bn - more than LSE and NYSE combined!
Even that's nothing - just wait until people look behind the curtain at Tether ($80bn) and discover what is actually there...
Ha, very true. There’s an old-fashioned ‘bank run’ coming on Tether at some point, and there’s not a fraction of the claimed USD behind them. They’re at playing fractional reserve banking, but without the central bank standing behind them.
What gets me is why that "bank run" hasn't started yet. Between Evergrande (it's remarkable how tether had nothing invested there), Moshe Hogeg and Celsius you would have thought any sane would be panicking.
I suspect anyone sane isn't into crypto that much though.
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
I met Piers once at a scientific conference when he was a grad student.
If I recollect, he was a very clever guy .... he was the real brains of the Corbyn family.
I think Piers subsequently had mental health problems and was not able to fulfil his academic potential or complete his PhD.
It seems likely that his railing against scientific orthodoxy (both with regard to climate change and vaccination) stems from his own disappointment at lack of a conventional scientific career.
Truth to tell, it is a sad case.
I agree with this. He almost certainly has or had a fairly impressive intellect coupled with serious and growing mental health problems. I do feel some sympathy for him, and there is an extent to which he is a useful bogeyman - are you getting vaccinated or do you ally yourself with this wild-eyed loon?
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Hmm, imagine a counterfactual where the British abolished their slave trade earlier than they did (perhaps partly because they never got iunvolved in the Caribbean and had the sense to retain all their North American colonies so that slavery did not take off in the USA).
(a) much less demand for slaves (b) much earlier intervention by the Royal Navy, partly as an instrument of economic war against the continental European slave colonies, but also acting to suppress the Barbary trade
(but this would be relevant mainly to West Africa)
Neither would have had an effect.
Selling slaves was a means for African rulers to get rid of their "excess" problem. Money was of course an important issue but not the primary one. So, if there was less demand from the US, it would not have solved their problem, what to do with the captured people. Hence the death / sold to Arabs issue.
Neither would the diversion of RN ships have made a difference or much of one. The routes would have gone inland in some cases and there is a question of whether 17th / 18th Century ships could have had the ability to patrol as effectively as the West Indian Squadron.
Ishmael hit on an important point, though he didn't realise it - Islam has no theological problem with slavery, whilst Christianity does, hence why the growth of the abolitionist movement was in European (and mainly English-speaking) countries
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
I expect a large proportion are either just a bit nervous of the safety of the jab, or frightened of needles. A £50 bung would work well I expect, and be pretty cost-effective.
The 3 acquaintances I know of appear to be: 1) a needle phobia, 2) an anti-Big Pharma stance, 3) new-age hippiedom.
The first I have a more sympathy with tbh and she did overcome it and get the jab with the support of her family. None of other would be in the slightest bit influenced by a £50 or larger bung.
Such a bribe would encourage a whole lot more to resist a jab when the next pandemic comes along in the hope of being paid.
Paying everyone £50 retrospectively per jab they've had might work better but not with my refusnik categories 2 and 3 above.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
I wouldn't know how to compare how "evil" they were.
I do think that if some Germans destroyed a statue of Hitler in Germany, it would be absolutely absurd to criticise them by saying "why aren't you demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy?"
Now, obviously the situation isn't the same with statues of slave traders in England, but JosiasJessop was the one who wanted to bring in an analogy with Hitler and Stalin and Mao.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.
It happens frequently when people get sectioned.
And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.
Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
Small pox didn't appear in December 2019 from nowhere. It was around for centuries prior to the vaccine becoming available which meant that when outbreaks occurred the number of people it could effect was small (everyone else had antibodies from the previous outbreak x years earlier).
So your argument is fine for old diseases, it falls completely apart for new ones. You just haven't seen the flaws yet.
My argument has nothing to do with the severity of the illness.
Where in my post did I talk about severity of illness? Once you get to the point of creating a completely imaginary point to argue against you've lost.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Just catching up, and to summarise the argument from a few on here, it seems to be as follows:
1. Colston was an evil slave trader. 2. However, there's lots of people just as evil, if not more so, throughout history and even in the present. 3. Put Colston's statue back up until all evil is extinguished.
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
I expect a large proportion are either just a bit nervous of the safety of the jab, or frightened of needles. A £50 bung would work well I expect, and be pretty cost-effective.
Yes, I'd be interested to see research on this. My instinct is that the unvaccinated aren't actually mainly like Piers Corbyn, or Novax Djokovic. I suspect it's more prosaic - they are a bit disengaged and don't like the idea of needles. That form of "anti-vax" doesn't get on the news as people don't go on marches waving "I am mildly squeamish and not that interested in the news" placards.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.
Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.
But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.
If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
I hope that's one of your better ones @HYUFD - whilst Trump is a candidate American democracy is in deep, deep peril imo.
Of course after Sarkozy lost the 2012 French presidential election for a few years it looked like he would sweep back and beat Hollande in 2017. In the end his PM Fillon got Les Republicains nomination, Hollande did not run for re election and Macron won the presidency.
Unless the GOP win a landslide in the House and Senate in November I doubt Trump will run again and DeSantis could well lose the Florida governorship to Crist leaving the way open for Pence. Buttigieg polls better than Biden or Harris on the Democrats side
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Fingers crossed, that the grass roots party activists can be persuaded to think the same. A couple of sane, centrist fifty-something Senators or Govenors, would make one hell of a change.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.
Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.
But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.
If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
"mental gymnastics"?
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
You are laughable.
"You are laughable." - Mmmm, talk about noting the splinter in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own. You are turning into the parody of Harry Enfield's Jurgen the German.
Read your own words. You highlight mental gymnastics when I said this was a white's only issue. You obviously read the article in detail so I fail to see how you didn't notice the following:
"With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Bono State and Songhai Empire.["
Where do you think those slaves were going Kamski on the Trans-Saharan route? Taking a detour up to Western Europe? How about the trade on the Indian Ocean?
And then we get to the point re wars:
"Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade,[47] around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders.[48] Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents,[49] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."[48]"
So, granted, wars were started but - to go to my central point along this - presenting this as an European only issue is laughable and a distortion of history.
I'd be careful about moral judgement on others. I have seen your type before - the earnest, no doubt educated left-winger who doesn't actually care about Black people but just cares about pontificating about how righteous they are.
All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.
Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.
What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.
All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.
You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.
Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.
Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).
Jesus christ. Talk about imposing your will upon others.
YBard's argument is a valid one. Shades of the Wakefield MMR furore, where parents who decided not to have their children vaccinated benefited from the herd immunity created by the children of other parents who did.
To be honest, I'm not opposed to legally mandating it in theory. In practice however it will not work because cohorts will lobby to get themselves excluded from the mandate - for example for medical reasons (many dubious) and religiosity. Laws should apply to all.
What appals me are the views of TSE and Nick P on here who are so utterly illiberal (from right and left) in demonising people who have made a legal choice.
I refer the Honourable Member to my previous comment (which he's seen because he replied to it):
"My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.
Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism."
I'm not demonising anyone (my landlady declines to be vaccinated - I like her though I declined a kindly-meant invitation to visit her for Christmas lunch), nor am I suggesting extra-legal pressure. I simply think that if one chooses not to be vaccinated, one should accept that society will wish to restrict the scope to infect others. That's not demonisation.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
"Electric" Pence only brings some of the GOP coalition. He gets them the Handmaid's Tale Christian arsehole but the fat lads with goatees and Pit Vipers who make up Trump's base fucking hate and would kill him if they could.
All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.
Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.
What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.
All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.
You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.
Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.
Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).
Jesus christ. Talk about imposing your will upon others.
YBard's argument is a valid one. Shades of the Wakefield MMR furore, where parents who decided not to have their children vaccinated benefited from the herd immunity created by the children of other parents who did.
To be honest, I'm not opposed to legally mandating it in theory. In practice however it will not work because cohorts will lobby to get themselves excluded from the mandate - for example for medical reasons (many dubious) and religiosity. Laws should apply to all.
What appals me are the views of TSE and Nick P on here who are so utterly illiberal (from right and left) in demonising people who have made a legal choice.
"My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair."
What grounds do you have to say that - people are getting covid now left, right and Chelsea so I'm not sure the "lower risk of passing it on" holds.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
I do think that's an interesting prediction and a credible longshot (albeit clearly a longshot).
Pence quite clearly feels Trump-mania will and perhaps is dampening down - and he isn't a fool. Trump no longer has Twitter, and the GOP may well have to lead the domestic agenda from next year if Congress flips - so it may well need to get more serious. People do get bored, and Trump is a bit boring. On balance, I don't see the spell being broken in time, and the evidence isn't that he's fading away, but it isn't ludicrous over a four year term. He's also 75 years of age and clinically obese - I don't wish anyone ill, but simply as an actuarial point, the odds of him having a massive stroke or whatever within the next three years are non-negligible.
And Biden is elderly and I have always said HAS to claim to be in it for the long haul to retain authority. But does it look the same this time next year if the GOP control Congress? His domestic authority (such as it is) will have gone and he becomes Mr Veto and Mr Foreign Policy. I can well see a speech in September 2023 when he says, "y'know folks, it's been a lot of fun but I'm no spring chicken and said myself I was a bridge to the future..." At that stage Buttigieg is a perfectly credible runner given Harris' rocky start (albeit she's probably still favourite).
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
They stay up until the activities of the the person on the statue are acknowledged to be disreputable. How ridiculous would the good folk of Leeds have looked if the proposed Statue of Jimmy Saville had been erected? ......and how long after his death would it have remained?
There's an honourable tradition of removing statues and the Bristol Jury should be commended. I look forward to the time Margaret Thatcher's family interests in South Africa are revisited.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
Who on earth says we are uniquely evil? I have reached mid life without anyone suggesting that or anything remotely like it.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
First, I'm not American but my wife is.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
No. Just people whose body can handle meat but they think it’s cool fad not to. No one else gets my goat in the same way - because they would obviously turn it into decent curry wouldn’t they?
Maybe I should be careful what I post when I have a hangover, It may appear I haven’t been cautious enough and lost the vegetarian/vegan vote, but truth is it’s a key plank of my platform - after my first 5 years as Primeminister there won’t be any veggie vegans left, the reeducation programmes will have converted them all back to proper food.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
"mental gymnastics"?
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
You are laughable.
"You are laughable." - Mmmm, talk about noting the splinter in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own. You are turning into the parody of Harry Enfield's Jurgen the German.
Read your own words. You highlight mental gymnastics when I said this was a white's only issue. You obviously read the article in detail so I fail to see how you didn't notice the following:
"With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Bono State and Songhai Empire.["
Where do you think those slaves were going Kamski on the Trans-Saharan route? Taking a detour up to Western Europe? How about the trade on the Indian Ocean?
And then we get to the point re wars:
"Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade,[47] around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders.[48] Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents,[49] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."[48]"
So, granted, wars were started but - to go to my central point along this - presenting this as an European only issue is laughable and a distortion of history.
I'd be careful about moral judgement on others. I have seen your type before - the earnest, no doubt educated left-winger who doesn't actually care about Black people but just cares about pontificating about how righteous they are.
Look you are the one who said "laughable" I just repeated your own insult to me. I'll ignore your latest insults.
The rest of what you say is completely irrelevant because I have never said, implied or thought that slavery is/was a "European only issue"
You were completely wrong to say that the slaves the Europeans bought were saved from either being slaves anyway or being killed, at least you admit that now.
All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.
Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.
What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.
All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.
You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.
Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.
Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).
Jesus christ. Talk about imposing your will upon others.
YBard's argument is a valid one. Shades of the Wakefield MMR furore, where parents who decided not to have their children vaccinated benefited from the herd immunity created by the children of other parents who did.
To be honest, I'm not opposed to legally mandating it in theory. In practice however it will not work because cohorts will lobby to get themselves excluded from the mandate - for example for medical reasons (many dubious) and religiosity. Laws should apply to all.
What appals me are the views of TSE and Nick P on here who are so utterly illiberal (from right and left) in demonising people who have made a legal choice.
"My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair."
What grounds do you have to say that - people are getting covid now left, right and Chelsea so I'm not sure the "lower risk of passing it on" holds.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
Who on earth says we are uniquely evil? I have reached mid life without anyone suggesting that or anything remotely like it.
That's exactly what not mentioning the larger world at the time produces. Slavery was, and is, complex, and ignoring (as we generally do) the wider aspects of slavery makes us seem uniquely complicit.
Just perusing the details of the year’s first poll, by Redfield and Wilton.
The Tories are failing to retain a huge chunk of people who voted for them in 2019. So are the Lib Dems, but presumably that is mostly folk who refused to back Corbyn now willing to vote tactically for Starmer’s party to get rid of the Sleaze Party.
The SNP has fantastic retention (I cannot recall ever seeing any party retaining 96% before). And those 2% LD-voters and 1% Lab-voters planning on voting SNP next time round might look tiny in a UK context, but are huge chunks of the SLD and SLab vote.
Retention of 2019 voters:
SNP 96% (Grn 3%, LD 2%) Lab 86% (Grn 4%, Con 4%, LD 3%, SNP 1%, Refuk 1%) Con 79% (Lab 11%, Refuk 5%, LD 3%) LD 70% (Lab 17%, Con 8%, Grn 3%, SNP 2%)
Yet still a 2.5% swing from SNP to SCon on that poll in the Scottish subsample
The reason being that the sub-sample is totally unweighted.
Only YouGov correctly weight the geographical sub-samples.
This is an outstandingly good poll from an SNP viewpoint.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Phew! Thank goodness for those European ships. I thought we were in trouble for a minute
Photos/video of her sitting outside the #Xian hospital on a plastic stool, having suffered a miscarriage, surrounded by a pool of blood received 100s of millions of views. Her niece, who posted them, said she was denied entry after her covid health test expired just hours earlier
The Director of #Xian's Health Department has just appeared on television bowing in apology for the miscarriage following denial of entry for treatment. All hospitals in the city have now been ordered to make arrangements to treat emergency cases without a recent #covid test.
You can reasonably point to historical vaccination and say that mandatory vaccination is not a new thing (though more common for travel or certain jobs) but, being happy with differential lockdown where necessary, I'm not on the page of broad compulsory vaccination for COVID.
I guess this has been covered, but essentially the Italian enforcement will be to amend the Green Pass vaccine passport to remove the option for a negative test for over 50s - which already includes attending workplaces. It will also extend it to hairdressers and post offices.
57% of abstainers are planning on voting Labour next time round. I’ll believe it when I see it. DNVs rarely change their habits. Mind you, when they do, the results can be spectacular.
How are 2019 DNVs planning on voting next time:
Lab 57% Con 20% LD 8% Grn 6% Refuk 6% Will not vote, again 4%
In this particular case it deserves some credibility. I met lots of Labour supporters who said they didn't feel they could vote for Corbyn but they certainly wouldb't vote for anyone else. That's a quite different cohort from the usual can't-be-arsed DNV.
I hope you’re right Nick!
My gut feeling is that lazy, useless sods are always lazy, useless sods, whatever lies they may tell to marketing research fieldworkers (or their online replacement).
If you are anywhere near correct, the Tories are going to get a very sound thrashing. Richly deserved.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
"mental gymnastics"?
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
You are laughable.
"You are laughable." - Mmmm, talk about noting the splinter in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own. You are turning into the parody of Harry Enfield's Jurgen the German.
Read your own words. You highlight mental gymnastics when I said this was a white's only issue. You obviously read the article in detail so I fail to see how you didn't notice the following:
"With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Bono State and Songhai Empire.["
Where do you think those slaves were going Kamski on the Trans-Saharan route? Taking a detour up to Western Europe? How about the trade on the Indian Ocean?
And then we get to the point re wars:
"Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade,[47] around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders.[48] Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents,[49] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."[48]"
So, granted, wars were started but - to go to my central point along this - presenting this as an European only issue is laughable and a distortion of history.
I'd be careful about moral judgement on others. I have seen your type before - the earnest, no doubt educated left-winger who doesn't actually care about Black people but just cares about pontificating about how righteous they are.
Look you are the one who said "laughable" I just repeated your own insult to me. I'll ignore your latest insults.
The rest of what you say is completely irrelevant because I have never said, implied or thought that slavery is/was a "European only issue"
You were completely wrong to say that the slaves the Europeans bought were saved from either being slaves anyway or being killed, at least you admit that now.
Don't pontificate Kamski - you've been rude to me in the past when I have made points and not criticised you personally. You reap what you sow.
To be fair though. you are not as bad as Ishmael who thinks that slavery is more evil when it's practiced by Christians rather than other religions.
Still, if only we could get you to admit that Stalin and Mao were evil bastards and deserve to rot in Hell along with Hitler...
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
Respectfully, that is nonsense. The people who have no confidence in Britain are the ones who think the country will collapse if we examine and criticise aspects of its past behaviour. The fact is that we achieved great wealth in large part via enthusiastic participation in a huge crime (getting rich by forcing others to work for free on pain of death is fairly parasitic I think you would agree). I don't think that the chief architects of that crime should continue to be honoured, especially as our future as a country rests on every one of its citizens, including millions of descendents of slaves, feeling like they have a stake in it. In my opinion it is the statue shaggers who lack any coherent vision of the future - they want us to worship the past without understanding it, and celebrate who we were not who we are or who we could become.
The issue is that the statute destroyers went outside the democratic process. It had been discussed. The local population (IIRC) was divided but wanted to retain it. There was a compromise of a detailed plaque although the wording was challenging to reach a consensus on.
And then a group of people decided that the democratic process wasn’t important.
(As an aside, the way they have left it damaged and on its side in a museum is an interesting and thoughtful response.)
That's a very partial reading of the situation. The Colston culters were essentially blocking any plaque with an accurate account of what Colston had done, preventing a resolution of the issue for years. I would have preferred to see the issue resolved in a different way, but I think the eventual outcome - Colston in a museum, lying in his back with BLM written across his chest in red letters, is the ideal one. And the fact that he was thrown into the waters of one of Britain's largest slave ports along the way isn't something I'm going to get too upset about. I am much more concerned about violence against people than against inanimate objects - having a heavier sentence for damaging a statue than for rape, for instance, is insane.
The wording posted here last night which had apparently been proposed by the merchant venturers did t seem unreasonable to me. It highlighted his role in the RAC, the number of slaves, etc.
On the other hand it did seem unreasonable to the democratically elected head of Bristol Council, whose views I would venture were perhaps more pertinent. What did the Colston cutlers object to in the original wording, do you know?
I’ve no idea. My issue is with 4 people deciding to circumnavigate the democratic process. I don’t really care about the specific statue
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
First, I'm not American but my wife is.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
There were societies on the West Coast of Africa up to at least the 19th century which believed that the Gods not only smiled on slavery, but demanded the sacrifice of slaves on a regular basis. What difficulty do you have with thinking that slavery by self-advertised Christians is morally worse than slavery by people who genuinely held those beliefs?
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Phew! Thank goodness for those European ships. I thought we were in trouble for a minute
The Barbary corsairs used to raid along the Mediterranean Roger. Thank God, they are gone, otherwise they could have seized you from your villa!
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
Who on earth says we are uniquely evil? I have reached mid life without anyone suggesting that or anything remotely like it.
That's exactly what not mentioning the larger world at the time produces. Slavery was, and is, complex, and ignoring (as we generally do) the wider aspects of slavery makes us seem uniquely complicit.
To my mind, that is just a bizarre interpretation of it. We teach the British aspects of history because we live here, things that happened in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London etc have more resonance than what happened in far away places. From my education I would say if anything the picture of our contribution to the world is a touch too rosy, not too negative. I was certainly never taught that we are uniquely good or evil, nor did I make a mental leap that by being taught about bad things the UK did, but not bad things Chileans did, that Chileans are less evil than Brits.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.
Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.
But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.
If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".
What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
"Electric" Pence only brings some of the GOP coalition. He gets them the Handmaid's Tale Christian arsehole but the fat lads with goatees and Pit Vipers who make up Trump's base fucking hate and would kill him if they could.
Are there ultimately enough of those people, particularly with the passage of time?
In the end, Pence was Trump's VP and can take real credit for what Republicans see as Trump's achievements. Trump got a little priapic on 6th January 2021 at the thought of Mike being strung up (not that you'd notice if Stormy is to be believed) but they did sort of kiss and make up. Relations plainly aren't good but Pence has a pretty good argument that he genuinely felt he had little choice but to certify an election in which - let's not forget - HE was personally on the losing ticket. Finally, Trump is elderly and obese - it is not statistically implausible that he won't be around to criticise Pence.
Just perusing the details of the year’s first poll, by Redfield and Wilton.
The Tories are failing to retain a huge chunk of people who voted for them in 2019. So are the Lib Dems, but presumably that is mostly folk who refused to back Corbyn now willing to vote tactically for Starmer’s party to get rid of the Sleaze Party.
The SNP has fantastic retention (I cannot recall ever seeing any party retaining 96% before). And those 2% LD-voters and 1% Lab-voters planning on voting SNP next time round might look tiny in a UK context, but are huge chunks of the SLD and SLab vote.
Retention of 2019 voters:
SNP 96% (Grn 3%, LD 2%) Lab 86% (Grn 4%, Con 4%, LD 3%, SNP 1%, Refuk 1%) Con 79% (Lab 11%, Refuk 5%, LD 3%) LD 70% (Lab 17%, Con 8%, Grn 3%, SNP 2%)
Yet still a 2.5% swing from SNP to SCon on that poll in the Scottish subsample
The reason being that the sub-sample is totally unweighted.
Only YouGov correctly weight the geographical sub-samples.
This is an outstandingly good poll from an SNP viewpoint.
You should rename yourself SNYFD and award yourself the HYUFD Prize for Ludicrous and Blind Loyalty To A Political Party.
Government in danger of losing some of their last remaining supporters in the press over the VAT on fuel issue and NI rise.
It appears that Mr Rees-Mogg - who, for someone so wealthy is clearly in tune with cost of living issues - had a row with the Chancellor on the subject in Cabinet yesterday.
“Yet this last great opportunity is about to be squandered: like his hero Winston Churchill, Johnson appears intent on winning the war – in Boris’s case, the double conflict of Brexit and Covid – but losing the peace. Inflation is out of control, taxes are being increased to their highest levels since Attlee, real wages are collapsing, migration and crime are not fixed, the schools are a mess, the NHS and social care are a bottomless, dysfunctional pit and yet Johnson seems the picture of insouciance, focusing on radical green policies that will make us even poorer.
“He seems stuck in a parallel, Labour-lite universe when it comes to the economy, tax, energy, public spending and the environment. His attitude to VAT cuts on energy is the perfect vignette of all that has gone wrong.”
Someone needs to tell the PM, that the problem is lying in bed next to him. Or else the backbenchers, and possibly a few frontbenchers, are going to be telling Sir Graham Brady.
Mr. kamski, Stalin and Mao are very suitable for comparison with Hitler.
Also, Hitler was far more associated, by design, with the concept of Germany (at the time) then slavery was with any individual country ever.
Go ahead and add up how "evil" each of them were and let me know.
Like I said, I didn't start making analogies with Hitler - take it up with JosiasJessop.
Yeah yeah, we all know Kamski - Stalin and Mao were not evil, they were doing it for the right cause.
You want to believe that, fine. Just don't preaching to the rest of us how you are essentially a good person. You actually are not
Ummm now you are saying that I have said "Stalin and Mao were not evil".
Nor have I ever preached to you that I am "essentially a good person" (although it is perhaps telling that you have imagined that - maybe you have doubts about whether you are a good person).
I am happy that you ridiculously claim that I am not a good person, I'll take it as a sign that I'm not so bad, given how much of a liar you are.
You are simply making things up, again.
You have a long history of attributing quotes to me (and others) that I have not only not said, but that I not said anything that could even be remotely misinterpreted to mean anything similar, and that I totally disagree with.
I have said this before, you are easily the most dishonest poster on this site. You just lie and lie and lie.
The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.
It happens frequently when people get sectioned.
And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.
Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
You must I thinik be right about it being mandatory for children.
But that would make it de facto mandatory for most soon-to-be-young-adults given the up to 14 age limits,. the population structure of the country and the age of compulsory vaccination, plus the prior immunity of many adults from catching it.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.
Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.
But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.
If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
Just perusing the details of the year’s first poll, by Redfield and Wilton.
The Tories are failing to retain a huge chunk of people who voted for them in 2019. So are the Lib Dems, but presumably that is mostly folk who refused to back Corbyn now willing to vote tactically for Starmer’s party to get rid of the Sleaze Party.
The SNP has fantastic retention (I cannot recall ever seeing any party retaining 96% before). And those 2% LD-voters and 1% Lab-voters planning on voting SNP next time round might look tiny in a UK context, but are huge chunks of the SLD and SLab vote.
Retention of 2019 voters:
SNP 96% (Grn 3%, LD 2%) Lab 86% (Grn 4%, Con 4%, LD 3%, SNP 1%, Refuk 1%) Con 79% (Lab 11%, Refuk 5%, LD 3%) LD 70% (Lab 17%, Con 8%, Grn 3%, SNP 2%)
Yet still a 2.5% swing from SNP to SCon on that poll in the Scottish subsample
The reason being that the sub-sample is totally unweighted.
Only YouGov correctly weight the geographical sub-samples.
This is an outstandingly good poll from an SNP viewpoint.
Losing 2 seats to the SCons based on it is hardly outstandingly good whatever quibbles about the weightings of the subsample
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
First, I'm not American but my wife is.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
There were societies on the West Coast of Africa up to at least the 19th century which believed that the Gods not only smiled on slavery, but demanded the sacrifice of slaves on a regular basis. What difficulty do you have with thinking that slavery by self-advertised Christians is morally worse than slavery by people who genuinely held those beliefs?
Do you believe in Universal Human Rights or not?
Your argument essentially allows someone to claim "yes, I killed a gay man but I'm not as bad as him because he's Christian but I'm Muslim / Hindu / worship trees etc."
Sure, the person doing the act should feel guilty because he has committed a sin according to the morals of his religion but that does not stop the act itself being in some ways, worse. It's an evil act.
Your line is that used by those who don't criticise the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighur or condemn Middle Eastern societies for how they treat women. It's a cop out and it is mainly used because the people saying it is far more scared about being accused of being racist / Islamophobic than they care about actual people.
I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.
Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.
So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.
But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.
Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
Yep, for clarification I am not in support of mandating vaccinations to the general public. But Gallowgate said very clearly that he didn't agree "with mandatory vaccination for adults at all." I was wondering how far this extended. I do think that those working in certain professions with vulnerable people should have to get vaccinated as a condition of employment. That applies to both NHS workers and Care Home staff.
Yes true ah I see.
And yes, except at some point the disadvantages of having fewer eg care home staff will outweigh the risks of having them unvaxxed.
ISTR that we are getting fairly ok Omicron care home stats aren't we.
Not sure - by which I mean I don't disagree with you as I haven't really been following the stats on this. It would not surprise me but I still think the general principle that anyone dealing professionally in a care capacity with the vulnerable should be vaccinated as a condition of employment.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
Who on earth says we are uniquely evil? I have reached mid life without anyone suggesting that or anything remotely like it.
That's exactly what not mentioning the larger world at the time produces. Slavery was, and is, complex, and ignoring (as we generally do) the wider aspects of slavery makes us seem uniquely complicit.
To my mind, that is just a bizarre interpretation of it. We teach the British aspects of history because we live here, things that happened in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London etc have more resonance than what happened in far away places. From my education I would say if anything the picture of our contribution to the world is a touch too rosy, not too negative. I was certainly never taught that we are uniquely good or evil, nor did I make a mental leap that by being taught about bad things the UK did, but not bad things Chileans did, that Chileans are less evil than Brits.
What staggers me is that I remember being taught about the slave triangle at the age of 8, without a single mention of the fact that it might be morally problematic. The cargo on the E to W crossing might as well have been hand made curios for the Christmas novelty market.
With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.
Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.
I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
Did they do the walk-up, no-questions-asked vaccination centres in England? Aimed at illegal immigrants, overstayers, women who didn’t usually leave the house and anyone else who might have fallen through the cracks in society.
Yes and had vans that went around and with high immigrant populations.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Other news from Italy includes a breakthrough in motor neurone disease research:
- The lack of an enzyme in the body causes the fatal nerve-wasting disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig's Disease, an Italian study has shown, raising hope for new treatment options.
- Italy’s inflation rate hits 3.9%
- Sicily returning fragment of Parthenon to Greece (Ahem… British Museum)
- Cases of COVID-19 in children and teenagers below the age of 18 in Italy almost doubled in the week between December 28 and January 3. The number of youngsters hospitalised also almost doubled from 66 to 123.
- Italy's small islands will be 'exiled' by vaccine restrictions, warn mayors. From Monday, Italy will only allow vaccinated citizens who have a "super green pass" to use public transport, such as planes and boats. The pass will only work for Italians who have been fully vaccinated against the virus or have recently recovered from infection. A negative test will no longer be sufficient to use transport under next week's new rules. But a number of officials have warned that some island residents will now be unable to travel to the Italian mainland and will find themselves in "forced exile". Most of Italy's 87 small islands -- which are represented by ANCIM -- have no permanent health facilities.
That last bit of the Italy news is one of those completely expected unexpected stories. A tiny set of people due to a particular set of circumstances have problems because no-one thought about them. Should be fixable easily enough given that the home addresses of the people will be known.
Indeed.
I get regular reports from the Tuscan island of Elba (the one where Napoleon was briefly imprisoned). It is one of the larger “small islands” and does actually have decent health infrastructure, although not comprehensive.
But is your assertion that “no one thought about them” really true? The central government wants these people to vaccinate too. Maybe especially this special demographic group?
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.
Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.
So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.
But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.
Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
Yep, for clarification I am not in support of mandating vaccinations to the general public. But Gallowgate said very clearly that he didn't agree "with mandatory vaccination for adults at all." I was wondering how far this extended. I do think that those working in certain professions with vulnerable people should have to get vaccinated as a condition of employment. That applies to both NHS workers and Care Home staff.
The issue is at what point you pull the line.
What about none front line care home staff. Suppliers to care homes...
You quickly get to a point especially when it's important rather than a minor irritant where it becomes everyone.
No I think the way it is suggested at the moment is reasonable. Anyone in direct front line contact with the vulnerable. That is what it has been for many years in the NHS - or at least parts of it - and that seems a reasonable and proportionate guide for Care Homes as well.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Hmm, imagine a counterfactual where the British abolished their slave trade earlier than they did (perhaps partly because they never got iunvolved in the Caribbean and had the sense to retain all their North American colonies so that slavery did not take off in the USA).
(a) much less demand for slaves (b) much earlier intervention by the Royal Navy, partly as an instrument of economic war against the continental European slave colonies, but also acting to suppress the Barbary trade
(but this would be relevant mainly to West Africa)
Neither would have had an effect.
Selling slaves was a means for African rulers to get rid of their "excess" problem. Money was of course an important issue but not the primary one. So, if there was less demand from the US, it would not have solved their problem, what to do with the captured people. Hence the death / sold to Arabs issue.
Neither would the diversion of RN ships have made a difference or much of one. The routes would have gone inland in some cases and there is a question of whether 17th / 18th Century ships could have had the ability to patrol as effectively as the West Indian Squadron.
Ishmael hit on an important point, though he didn't realise it - Islam has no theological problem with slavery, whilst Christianity does, hence why the growth of the abolitionist movement was in European (and mainly English-speaking) countries
Routes inland? Given the jungle and deserts? Surely not.
And the RN was preying perfectly easily on French and Dutdch trade in the Caribbean from the mid-C18 onwards, even if the Bight of Benin would have been lethal. Indeed, not trading to W. Africa would have helped keep up the British nautical proletariat of sailors who shifted between commerce and the RN as required.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
First, I'm not American but my wife is.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
There were societies on the West Coast of Africa up to at least the 19th century which believed that the Gods not only smiled on slavery, but demanded the sacrifice of slaves on a regular basis. What difficulty do you have with thinking that slavery by self-advertised Christians is morally worse than slavery by people who genuinely held those beliefs?
Do you believe in Universal Human Rights or not?
Your argument essentially allows someone to claim "yes, I killed a gay man but I'm not as bad as him because he's Christian but I'm Muslim / Hindu / worship trees etc."
Sure, the person doing the act should feel guilty because he has committed a sin according to the morals of his religion but that does not stop the act itself being in some ways, worse. It's an evil act.
Your line is that used by those who don't criticise the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighur or condemn Middle Eastern societies for how they treat women. It's a cop out and it is mainly used because the people saying it is far more scared about being accused of being racist / Islamophobic than they care about actual people.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
First, I'm not American but my wife is.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
There were societies on the West Coast of Africa up to at least the 19th century which believed that the Gods not only smiled on slavery, but demanded the sacrifice of slaves on a regular basis. What difficulty do you have with thinking that slavery by self-advertised Christians is morally worse than slavery by people who genuinely held those beliefs?
Do you believe in Universal Human Rights or not?
Your argument essentially allows someone to claim "yes, I killed a gay man but I'm not as bad as him because he's Christian but I'm Muslim / Hindu / worship trees etc."
Sure, the person doing the act should feel guilty because he has committed a sin according to the morals of his religion but that does not stop the act itself being in some ways, worse. It's an evil act.
Your line is that used by those who don't criticise the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighur or condemn Middle Eastern societies for how they treat women. It's a cop out and it is mainly used because the people saying it is far more scared about being accused of being racist / Islamophobic than they care about actual people.
No, love. You made an argument which looked at first sight like morally rock bottom. I pointed out that it was actually worse than that.
here's an idea: Campaign for Trump. get him reelected. then campaign for the Negro Disenfranchisement Act, and make sure it has aGeorge Floyd Had It Coming clause in it.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
I hope that's one of your better ones @HYUFD - whilst Trump is a candidate American democracy is in deep, deep peril imo.
On the plus side, plunging the US into a civil war could be a way to make Mexico finally pay for that wall.
I wish it wasn't so, but the Trumpers would easily win. The Democrats still don't seem to understand that THEY need to stock up on guns and ammo.
Neither would win, most likely the US would split with the old Confederacy re emerging as the basis of a new Trumpite state and the rest of the USA moving forward in a more liberal direction
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions
Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?
A rather racist view perhaps ?
And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing
Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.
"It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
"mental gymnastics"?
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
You are laughable.
"You are laughable." - Mmmm, talk about noting the splinter in your brother's eye when you have a plank in your own. You are turning into the parody of Harry Enfield's Jurgen the German.
Read your own words. You highlight mental gymnastics when I said this was a white's only issue. You obviously read the article in detail so I fail to see how you didn't notice the following:
"With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Bono State and Songhai Empire.["
Where do you think those slaves were going Kamski on the Trans-Saharan route? Taking a detour up to Western Europe? How about the trade on the Indian Ocean?
And then we get to the point re wars:
"Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade,[47] around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders.[48] Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents,[49] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."[48]"
So, granted, wars were started but - to go to my central point along this - presenting this as an European only issue is laughable and a distortion of history.
I'd be careful about moral judgement on others. I have seen your type before - the earnest, no doubt educated left-winger who doesn't actually care about Black people but just cares about pontificating about how righteous they are.
Look you are the one who said "laughable" I just repeated your own insult to me. I'll ignore your latest insults.
The rest of what you say is completely irrelevant because I have never said, implied or thought that slavery is/was a "European only issue"
You were completely wrong to say that the slaves the Europeans bought were saved from either being slaves anyway or being killed, at least you admit that now.
Don't pontificate Kamski - you've been rude to me in the past when I have made points and not criticised you personally. You reap what you sow.
To be fair though. you are not as bad as Ishmael who thinks that slavery is more evil when it's practiced by Christians rather than other religions.
Still, if only we could get you to admit that Stalin and Mao were evil bastards and deserve to rot in Hell along with Hitler...
1. I regard continually putting words into my mouth that I never said (nor said anything remotely similar) despite me repeatedly asking you not to as being personally rude to me - that is what happened before I was rude to you in the past, and it is also what you are doing today.
2. If I believed hell I would be quite happy to agree that Stalin and Mao deserve to rot there alongside Hitler, as I suspect you already know. Or have I ever give even the slightest indication that I admire Stalin or Mao?
Mr. kamski, Stalin and Mao are very suitable for comparison with Hitler.
Also, Hitler was far more associated, by design, with the concept of Germany (at the time) then slavery was with any individual country ever.
Go ahead and add up how "evil" each of them were and let me know.
Like I said, I didn't start making analogies with Hitler - take it up with JosiasJessop.
Yeah yeah, we all know Kamski - Stalin and Mao were not evil, they were doing it for the right cause.
You want to believe that, fine. Just don't preaching to the rest of us how you are essentially a good person. You actually are not
Ummm now you are saying that I have said "Stalin and Mao were not evil".
Nor have I ever preached to you that I am "essentially a good person" (although it is perhaps telling that you have imagined that - maybe you have doubts about whether you are a good person).
I am happy that you ridiculously claim that I am not a good person, I'll take it as a sign that I'm not so bad, given how much of a liar you are.
You are simply making things up, again.
You have a long history of attributing quotes to me (and others) that I have not only not said, but that I not said anything that could even be remotely misinterpreted to mean anything similar, and that I totally disagree with.
I have said this before, you are easily the most dishonest poster on this site. You just lie and lie and lie.
Not as much as you lied in that post Kamski. And you twist my words - I didn't say you said Stalin and Mao were not evil, I was referring to your seeming inability to admit that Stalin, Mao and Hitler were all evil and equally so. If you wanted to go solely by numbers, Mao would win it with Stalin second.
However, say - in direct quotes - where I have attributed things to you and others to back up your point.
As for being the most dishonest poster etc etc, I'll take it as a compliment coming from your good self.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
I do think that's an interesting prediction and a credible longshot (albeit clearly a longshot).
Pence quite clearly feels Trump-mania will and perhaps is dampening down - and he isn't a fool...
In that belief, I think he is. Little chance of any such thing this side of 2024.
(As far a Buttigieg is concerned, my 60/1 book means I am in total agreement with you. )
Pence isn't some kind of "Never Trump" cheerleader, though. He isn't Liz Cheney or Larry Hogan. He was Trump's VP and they even kind of kissed and made up after the whole "trying to get Mike hanged" misunderstanding.
What he's relying on is not that Trump fades into irrelevance or that he becomes actively disliked in the Republican Party. It's that minds move away from "stolen" elections and towards the future. Perhaps the elderly and obese Trump isn't personally able to run in 2024. Perhaps Cohen is right and it's all a cash-scam - he has no intention of going again. Perhaps the "thanks for your service, Donald, but let's get someone who can serve two terms" tendency grows a bit (clearly a minority now but not a negligible one).
As suggested, a long shot. But not craziness, I think.
I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.
So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.
57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...
Trump may actually win the election fair and square and even win the popular vote in 2024.
Latest poll is Trump 44% Biden 38% with 8% of Biden 2020 voters now backing Trump
But all the polls show that both Biden and Trump are unpopular, and three quarters of Americans don't want another match between them.
By the way, the last line of the header has an unintentional double negative.
Yes, I think it would be better if neither ran – and so do Americans by the looks of that survey!
Believe it or not, I would agree with that. I don't think Trump should run. I suspect he will.
My longshot prediction is also that neither will run and 2024 will be Buttigieg v Pence
I hope that's one of your better ones @HYUFD - whilst Trump is a candidate American democracy is in deep, deep peril imo.
On the plus side, plunging the US into a civil war could be a way to make Mexico finally pay for that wall.
I wish it wasn't so, but the Trumpers would easily win. The Democrats still don't seem to understand that THEY need to stock up on guns and ammo.
Yes, by the time they’d finished their arguments - via several-thousand-word opinion pieces and Twitter spats - about the gender and race balance of their army, with provisions for conscientious objection and separate facilities for the trans women, the other side would have bought up all the guns, ammo and trucks. The “war” wouldn’t last long.
Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.
Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.
The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.
No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.
The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.
Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.
Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);
They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.
They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.
And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.
That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.
If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.
Both are about power, and its abuse.
What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.
At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.
Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.
You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then? Also: Islamists? And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?
(Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)
This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.
Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.
It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
Come on, in the UK we don't spend equal time on British, Mongolian, Bulgarian and Chilean history. We focus mostly on British history with a bit of world stuff thrown in. The same should apply here, we should concentrate on the British stuff and mention the other stuff, not give it equal billing.
You come on. I've been told on here that mentioning the work of the West Africa Squadron is wrong. Toppling these statues is not about the statues - it is about trying to impose a restricted view of history, one where we are uniquely evil. That's a really bad idea IMO, for the reasons I've given before.
Who on earth says we are uniquely evil? I have reached mid life without anyone suggesting that or anything remotely like it.
That's exactly what not mentioning the larger world at the time produces. Slavery was, and is, complex, and ignoring (as we generally do) the wider aspects of slavery makes us seem uniquely complicit.
To my mind, that is just a bizarre interpretation of it. We teach the British aspects of history because we live here, things that happened in Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, London etc have more resonance than what happened in far away places. From my education I would say if anything the picture of our contribution to the world is a touch too rosy, not too negative. I was certainly never taught that we are uniquely good or evil, nor did I make a mental leap that by being taught about bad things the UK did, but not bad things Chileans did, that Chileans are less evil than Brits.
Of course it has more resonance: but that makes it all the more important to tell the wider story as well, and to tell it (as well as possible for history) truthfully.
We live in a country that has a predominantly Christian past. Yet the little 'un's school is teaching about other religions as well - and I am absolutely in favour of that. If a school does not have (say) a Muslim in it, or a Hindu, or a Jew, it should still give its kids a background to those religions as well, even if it has no 'resonance'.
Just perusing the details of the year’s first poll, by Redfield and Wilton.
The Tories are failing to retain a huge chunk of people who voted for them in 2019. So are the Lib Dems, but presumably that is mostly folk who refused to back Corbyn now willing to vote tactically for Starmer’s party to get rid of the Sleaze Party.
The SNP has fantastic retention (I cannot recall ever seeing any party retaining 96% before). And those 2% LD-voters and 1% Lab-voters planning on voting SNP next time round might look tiny in a UK context, but are huge chunks of the SLD and SLab vote.
Retention of 2019 voters:
SNP 96% (Grn 3%, LD 2%) Lab 86% (Grn 4%, Con 4%, LD 3%, SNP 1%, Refuk 1%) Con 79% (Lab 11%, Refuk 5%, LD 3%) LD 70% (Lab 17%, Con 8%, Grn 3%, SNP 2%)
Yet still a 2.5% swing from SNP to SCon on that poll in the Scottish subsample
The reason being that the sub-sample is totally unweighted.
Only YouGov correctly weight the geographical sub-samples.
This is an outstandingly good poll from an SNP viewpoint.
You should rename yourself SNYFD and award yourself the HYUFD Prize for Ludicrous and Blind Loyalty To A Political Party.
You are a hater who hates. Nothing new there. Off you slither.
Comments
First, Biden is not in control of his party, nor is Pelosi. The Squad has disproportionate - and growing - influence which is why there has been so much pushback. Biden was supposed to be a moderate for many people, not push what to many is extreme measures. He has also championed measures such as HR1, which - for all the fine language - is essentially meant to ensure a bias in the electoral system for the Democrats.
I wouldn't say the lunatics are in charge of the Republicans office. Marjorie Taylor Greene has less influence in the Republican people than AOC and Ilhan "it's all about the Benjamins, Baby" Omar does on the Democrat side. Believe it or not
I disagree with your comments about stealing the election being on a lesser pedestal. Both undermine the democratic process (and we will leave aside the obvious retort of what the BLM riots and anti-Trump riots in Washington in 2020 were doing if not a manifestation of political violence and / or an attempt to intimidate the Government). And you are wrong to say Hilary accepted 2016, she didn't - here she is 2019 claiming the election was "stolen" from her:
https://news.yahoo.com/hillary-clinton-claims-presidential-election-220135269.html
By all means make life a bit more hassle or expensive for those unjabbed - per Macron's approach - just as we do for smokers. But mandatory vaccinations for adults would be state overreach. And damning anti-vaxxers as "potential killers" is judgmental and intolerant.
I've been a liberal all my life, and believed we need to avoid simplistic judgments and to use persuasion ahead of force wherever possible, so it dismays me to see how many erstwhile "liberals" online seem to be intensely relaxed about various forms of state authoritarianism that would have been unthinkable only 2 years ago.
https://twitter.com/b_nishanov/status/1478762035919863817
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.
You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
I was going to link to my review, but can't find it. How peculiar. Hmm. It's a grim read. But worth it, especially for those (like me) who had/have limited knowledge of the USSR and Stalin.
Comparison of infectious SARS-CoV-2 from the nasopharynx of vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.28.21268460v1
...Here, we conducted a study involving 125 patients comprised of 72 vaccinated and 53 unvaccinated individuals, to assess the levels of infectious virus in in vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Quantitative plaque assays showed no significant differences in the titers of virus between these cohorts. However, the proportion of nasopharyngeal samples with culturable virus was lower in the vaccinated patients relative to unvaccinated patients (21% vs. 40%). Finally, time-to-event analysis with Kaplan-Myer curves revealed that protection from culturable infectious virus waned significantly starting at 5 months after completing a 2-dose regimen of mRNA vaccines. These results have important implications in timing of booster dose to prevent onward transmission from breakthrough cases....
To say The Squad has equivalent standing in the Democrats as Trump, or that they are as extreme is so ludicrous that it doesn't merit a response.
You can agree or disagree with reforms to make voting easier (you might legitimately disagree on the basis it potentially makes it less secure) but you cannot sensibly call it extreme.
And to post a Fox News clip of a few seconds of a Hillary Clinton Q&A event and say that proves she hasn't accepted her loss in 2016, when she attended the inaugeration, wished Trump well, and wrote a f***ing book about why she lost... well, I'd say you're better than that but all the evidence says you aren't.
maybe start by reading the article that YOU linked to:
"The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of people were bought or captured from West Africa and taken to the Americas.[239] The increase of demand for slaves due to the expansion of European colonial powers to the New World made the slave trade much more lucrative to the West African powers, leading to the establishment of a number of actual West African empires thriving on slave trade.[240] These included the Bono State, Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, and the kingdom of Dahomey.[241] These kingdoms relied on a militaristic culture of constant warfare to generate the great numbers of human captives required for trade with the Europeans.[4][242] It is documented in the Slave Trade Debates of England in the early 19th century: "All the old writers concur in stating not only that wars are entered into for the sole purpose of making slaves, but that they are fomented by Europeans, with a view to that object."[243] The gradual abolition of slavery in European colonial empires during the 19th century again led to the decline and collapse of these African empires.[244] When European powers began to stop the Atlantic slave trade, this caused a further change in that large holders of slaves in Africa began to exploit enslaved people on plantations and other agricultural products.[245]"
You are laughable.
Having said this, the last time I saw him was in a restaurant in Thurso on the eve of the eclipse in 2001. He was poring over a gigantic weather chart so I sidled up to his table and asked for an expert prognosis. 'Cloudy round here, clear in the west' was the gist of his reply. Armed with this 'information' I took an exhilarating drive to Durness, chasing the sunset all the way, and was rewarded by the sight of a perfect annular eclipse at dawn the following morning.
So cheers, Piers. You're not all bad.
I suspect anyone sane isn't into crypto that much though.
Selling slaves was a means for African rulers to get rid of their "excess" problem. Money was of course an important issue but not the primary one. So, if there was less demand from the US, it would not have solved their problem, what to do with the captured people. Hence the death / sold to Arabs issue.
Neither would the diversion of RN ships have made a difference or much of one. The routes would have gone inland in some cases and there is a question of whether 17th / 18th Century ships could have had the ability to patrol as effectively as the West Indian Squadron.
Ishmael hit on an important point, though he didn't realise it - Islam has no theological problem with slavery, whilst Christianity does, hence why the growth of the abolitionist movement was in European (and mainly English-speaking) countries
The first I have a more sympathy with tbh and she did overcome it and get the jab with the support of her family. None of other would be in the slightest bit influenced by a £50 or larger bung.
Such a bribe would encourage a whole lot more to resist a jab when the next pandemic comes along in the hope of being paid.
Paying everyone £50 retrospectively per jab they've had might work better but not with my refusnik categories 2 and 3 above.
🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳
PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
I do think that if some Germans destroyed a statue of Hitler in Germany, it would be absolutely absurd to criticise them by saying "why aren't you demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy?"
Now, obviously the situation isn't the same with statues of slave traders in England, but JosiasJessop was the one who wanted to bring in an analogy with Hitler and Stalin and Mao.
Also, Hitler was far more associated, by design, with the concept of Germany (at the time) then slavery was with any individual country ever.
1. Colston was an evil slave trader.
2. However, there's lots of people just as evil, if not more so, throughout history and even in the present.
3. Put Colston's statue back up until all evil is extinguished.
Hope I've got that right.
Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.
But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.
If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
Unless the GOP win a landslide in the House and Senate in November I doubt Trump will run again and DeSantis could well lose the Florida governorship to Crist leaving the way open for Pence. Buttigieg polls better than Biden or Harris on the Democrats side
Like I said, I didn't start making analogies with Hitler - take it up with JosiasJessop.
Read your own words. You highlight mental gymnastics when I said this was a white's only issue. You obviously read the article in detail so I fail to see how you didn't notice the following:
"With the development of the trans-Saharan slave trade and the economies of gold in the western Sahel, a number of the major states became organized around the slave trade, including the Ghana Empire, the Mali Empire, the Bono State and Songhai Empire.["
Where do you think those slaves were going Kamski on the Trans-Saharan route? Taking a detour up to Western Europe? How about the trade on the Indian Ocean?
And then we get to the point re wars:
"Historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood of Boston University have estimated that of the Africans captured and then sold as slaves to the New World in the Atlantic slave trade,[47] around 90% were enslaved by fellow Africans who sold them to European traders.[48] Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard Chair of African and African American Studies, has stated that "without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents,[49] the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred."[48]"
So, granted, wars were started but - to go to my central point along this - presenting this as an European only issue is laughable and a distortion of history.
I'd be careful about moral judgement on others. I have seen your type before - the earnest, no doubt educated left-winger who doesn't actually care about Black people but just cares about pontificating about how righteous they are.
"My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.
Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism."
I'm not demonising anyone (my landlady declines to be vaccinated - I like her though I declined a kindly-meant invitation to visit her for Christmas lunch), nor am I suggesting extra-legal pressure. I simply think that if one chooses not to be vaccinated, one should accept that society will wish to restrict the scope to infect others. That's not demonisation.
But it's a busy day so I'll leave it there.
“Huge numbers” of pupils at 6 NW secondary schools are refusing to do LFTs and wear masks according to
@NASUWT
I am pondering which schools these are though.
Pence quite clearly feels Trump-mania will and perhaps is dampening down - and he isn't a fool. Trump no longer has Twitter, and the GOP may well have to lead the domestic agenda from next year if Congress flips - so it may well need to get more serious. People do get bored, and Trump is a bit boring. On balance, I don't see the spell being broken in time, and the evidence isn't that he's fading away, but it isn't ludicrous over a four year term. He's also 75 years of age and clinically obese - I don't wish anyone ill, but simply as an actuarial point, the odds of him having a massive stroke or whatever within the next three years are non-negligible.
And Biden is elderly and I have always said HAS to claim to be in it for the long haul to retain authority. But does it look the same this time next year if the GOP control Congress? His domestic authority (such as it is) will have gone and he becomes Mr Veto and Mr Foreign Policy. I can well see a speech in September 2023 when he says, "y'know folks, it's been a lot of fun but I'm no spring chicken and said myself I was a bridge to the future..." At that stage Buttigieg is a perfectly credible runner given Harris' rocky start (albeit she's probably still favourite).
There's an honourable tradition of removing statues and the Bristol Jury should be commended. I look forward to the time Margaret Thatcher's family interests in South Africa are revisited.
Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:
"The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "
So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"
Just quoting your own words.
As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them
https://www.irishamerica.com/2015/10/the-irish-of-barbados-photos/
And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.
But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
Maybe I should be careful what I post when I have a hangover, It may appear I haven’t been cautious enough and lost the vegetarian/vegan vote, but truth is it’s a key plank of my platform - after my first 5 years as Primeminister there won’t be any veggie vegans left, the reeducation programmes will have converted them all back to proper food.
The idea of Harris vs Trump in 2024 scares me in particular.
The rest of what you say is completely irrelevant because I have never said, implied or thought that slavery is/was a "European only issue"
You were completely wrong to say that the slaves the Europeans bought were saved from either being slaves anyway or being killed, at least you admit that now.
Little chance of any such thing this side of 2024.
(As far a Buttigieg is concerned, my 60/1 book means I am in total agreement with you.
You want to believe that, fine. Just don't preaching to the rest of us how you are essentially a good person. You actually are not
Only YouGov correctly weight the geographical sub-samples.
This is an outstandingly good poll from an SNP viewpoint.
Phew! Thank goodness for those European ships. I thought we were in trouble for a minute
The Director of #Xian's Health Department has just appeared on television bowing in apology for the miscarriage following denial of entry for treatment. All hospitals in the city have now been ordered to make arrangements to treat emergency cases without a recent #covid test.
https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1479036996534390787?t=JyloOBqEDEATNbo48Sisrw&s=19
I guess this has been covered, but essentially the Italian enforcement will be to amend the Green Pass vaccine passport to remove the option for a negative test for over 50s - which already includes attending workplaces. It will also extend it to hairdressers and post offices.
My gut feeling is that lazy, useless sods are always lazy, useless sods, whatever lies they may tell to marketing research fieldworkers (or their online replacement).
If you are anywhere near correct, the Tories are going to get a very sound thrashing. Richly deserved.
To be fair though. you are not as bad as Ishmael who thinks that slavery is more evil when it's practiced by Christians rather than other religions.
Still, if only we could get you to admit that Stalin and Mao were evil bastards and deserve to rot in Hell along with Hitler...
In the end, Pence was Trump's VP and can take real credit for what Republicans see as Trump's achievements. Trump got a little priapic on 6th January 2021 at the thought of Mike being strung up (not that you'd notice if Stormy is to be believed) but they did sort of kiss and make up. Relations plainly aren't good but Pence has a pretty good argument that he genuinely felt he had little choice but to certify an election in which - let's not forget - HE was personally on the losing ticket. Finally, Trump is elderly and obese - it is not statistically implausible that he won't be around to criticise Pence.
It appears that Mr Rees-Mogg - who, for someone so wealthy is clearly in tune with cost of living issues - had a row with the Chancellor on the subject in Cabinet yesterday.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/01/05/boriss-total-conversion-brownism-tax-betrayal-middle-england/
“Yet this last great opportunity is about to be squandered: like his hero Winston Churchill, Johnson appears intent on winning the war – in Boris’s case, the double conflict of Brexit and Covid – but losing the peace. Inflation is out of control, taxes are being increased to their highest levels since Attlee, real wages are collapsing, migration and crime are not fixed, the schools are a mess, the NHS and social care are a bottomless, dysfunctional pit and yet Johnson seems the picture of insouciance, focusing on radical green policies that will make us even poorer.
“He seems stuck in a parallel, Labour-lite universe when it comes to the economy, tax, energy, public spending and the environment. His attitude to VAT cuts on energy is the perfect vignette of all that has gone wrong.”
Someone needs to tell the PM, that the problem is lying in bed next to him. Or else the backbenchers, and possibly a few frontbenchers, are going to be telling Sir Graham Brady.
Nor have I ever preached to you that I am "essentially a good person" (although it is perhaps telling that you have imagined that - maybe you have doubts about whether you are a good person).
I am happy that you ridiculously claim that I am not a good person, I'll take it as a sign that I'm not so bad, given how much of a liar you are.
You are simply making things up, again.
You have a long history of attributing quotes to me (and others) that I have not only not said, but that I not said anything that could even be remotely misinterpreted to mean anything similar, and that I totally disagree with.
I have said this before, you are easily the most dishonest poster on this site. You just lie and lie and lie.
https://www.le.ac.uk/lahs/downloads/1967-68/1967-68 (43) 35-44 Ross.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-50713991
But that would make it de facto mandatory for most soon-to-be-young-adults given the up to 14 age limits,. the population structure of the country and the age of compulsory vaccination, plus the prior immunity of many adults from catching it.
Your argument essentially allows someone to claim "yes, I killed a gay man but I'm not as bad as him because he's Christian but I'm Muslim / Hindu / worship trees etc."
Sure, the person doing the act should feel guilty because he has committed a sin according to the morals of his religion but that does not stop the act itself being in some ways, worse. It's an evil act.
Your line is that used by those who don't criticise the Chinese for their treatment of the Uighur or condemn Middle Eastern societies for how they treat women. It's a cop out and it is mainly used because the people saying it is far more scared about being accused of being racist / Islamophobic than they care about actual people.
I get regular reports from the Tuscan island of Elba (the one where Napoleon was briefly imprisoned). It is one of the larger “small islands” and does actually have decent health infrastructure, although not comprehensive.
But is your assertion that “no one thought about them” really true? The central government wants these people to vaccinate too. Maybe especially this special demographic group?
I'm not sure it's a good hope.
And the RN was preying perfectly easily on French and Dutdch trade in the Caribbean from the mid-C18 onwards, even if the Bight of Benin would have been lethal. Indeed, not trading to W. Africa would have helped keep up the British nautical proletariat of sailors who shifted between commerce and the RN as required.
here's an idea: Campaign for Trump. get him reelected. then campaign for the Negro Disenfranchisement Act, and make sure it has aGeorge Floyd Had It Coming clause in it.
2. If I believed hell I would be quite happy to agree that Stalin and Mao deserve to rot there alongside Hitler, as I suspect you already know. Or have I ever give even the slightest indication that I admire Stalin or Mao?
However, say - in direct quotes - where I have attributed things to you and others to back up your point.
As for being the most dishonest poster etc etc, I'll take it as a compliment coming from your good self.
What he's relying on is not that Trump fades into irrelevance or that he becomes actively disliked in the Republican Party. It's that minds move away from "stolen" elections and towards the future. Perhaps the elderly and obese Trump isn't personally able to run in 2024. Perhaps Cohen is right and it's all a cash-scam - he has no intention of going again. Perhaps the "thanks for your service, Donald, but let's get someone who can serve two terms" tendency grows a bit (clearly a minority now but not a negligible one).
As suggested, a long shot. But not craziness, I think.
We live in a country that has a predominantly Christian past. Yet the little 'un's school is teaching about other religions as well - and I am absolutely in favour of that. If a school does not have (say) a Muslim in it, or a Hindu, or a Jew, it should still give its kids a background to those religions as well, even if it has no 'resonance'.