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All Trussed up and nowhere to go – politicalbetting.com
All Trussed up and nowhere to go – politicalbetting.com
Recently I worked out I had a relationship that lasted substantially fewer days than the premiership of Liz Truss, once I overcame the embarrassment of having such a short relationship I started to wonder what the future would hold for Liz Truss, the country’s shortest serving Prime Minister.
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In terms of actual dangerous things, it's far worse that autocratic governments interfere in Western elections. That political debate on major social networks can be bought up by the richest billionaire who censors criticism of himself. That the world economy is increasingly a new gilded age of monopolies that can bend governments to their preferred policies. Even if we are talking abstract ideological agendas, it's more concerning that the world's biggest movie franchise is constantly pushing the military-industrial complex as heroes.
If Ms Keen had an ounce of smarts she would have conduced some ersatz consultation with “local community representatives” and then announced the exhibition would be “revised to make sense for the world of 2022”.
By suddenly closing it and posting a set of ideologically bankrupt gibberish on Twitter, she will bring about an inevitable backlash.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-63772864
Always find it interesting that these claims will go unchallenged / unexplored...for instance who was concerned? How widespread?
I trust the Wellcome Trust is fully accessible to wheelchairs.
The betting market is that Truss is almost certain to chuck in the towel?
They may as well close now.
I'll be surprised if this decision is reversed, we shall see. It's not even been DEBATED
And this is the point, and this is one of many reasons why Wokeness is truly dangerous. It does not believe there is an argument, it is entirely in the right, anything they want to cancel must be cancelled. Simple as. There is never nuance, never room for compromise. The statues must be thrown in the river
And the Wokerati are everywhere now. If you check the other workers at Wellcome - they are all on Twitter - they are all openly "left wing" "she/her" "they/them" - the Woke have entirely captured this one institution, as they are capturing so many institutions - in the arts, law, education, universities, charities, media, corporations. And their aim is quite open: to impose one jaundiced strangulated view of our culture and history: that it is irredeemably awful, that all; we did was destroy and colonise, and that white people are intrinsically racist and must always be ashamed
(I can't imagine what else she'll do - she must be almost unemployable)
This is not @Casino_Royale getting upset that a bookshop has opened in the Winersh Triangle.
Here is the Twitter profile of one of the most senior people in the sector
"Director @museumsassoc chair @our_MOH, trustee @thackraymuseum @museum_forum
Passionate about equality & anti-racism, Leeds lass & feminist"
https://twitter.com/Sharonheal/status/1596826865205129216?s=20&t=lNY-6717r1Hh9Nwmr_euYg
Her opinion of Wellcome closing its core exhibition?
"A thoughtful, ethical & brave approach to rethinking what a museum is from
@ExploreWellcome
👏👏👏"
They are APPLAUDING it
In the run up to the Ukrainian war, we were discussing empires. When I pointed out that the Russian and Chinese states were and are explicit empires, doing the bad things that empires do, various people of the progressive bent, here, tried to tell me that
- they can’t be
- that’s what aboutery for the British Empire
- it’s hypocritical
The annihilation of cultures (such as Tibetan) in the modern Chinese empire is beyond dispute. As is their promulgation of a weird, plastic fake version of Han culture as the uniform culture of all China.
The Russian attempted destruction of Ukraine as a culture is also now beyond doubt.
The Chinese and Russian propaganda behind this is extremely…. Gammon - literally, the natives are grateful for everything we do. Pure Sanders of The River - if Sanders recreationally massacred the locals on occasion.
Woke often seems to be a new narrative combined with shut up about anything else.
It is the anything else that needs looking at - otherwise you get people telling lies about the Aztecs really being humanitarians.
So Joseph Bazelgette building the sewers of London was a macro aggression against those dying of cholera.
She might live like that now.
Appointing museum curators who openly hate museums and want to close museums down
DOWN WITH ART AND LEARNING. IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
No suggestion was given about providing and informatuve and enjoyable destination for paying customers to visit, thereby ensuring the ongoing viability of the museum.
And it made me realise what a long time it was since I'd been to a museum and not felt hectored. Almost every museum you visit will try to crowbar in some fashionable cause.
Happily, in October, I visited the camera obscura and optical illusion museum in Edinburgh. Fucking brilliant. Entirely focused on providing an enjoyable experience for visitors. And consequently, almost solidly booked out. You couldn't just turn up, you had to book in advance.
I even came out wondering whether it was, in fact, a real museum, given that I was enjoying myself. But it clearly was. You were informed and engaged and learned stuff. You just weren't invited to feel bad while you did it.
Actually, I've just thought of another one which falls into that category: the National Railway Museum in York (which you're also well advised to book ahead for).
3rd v 2nd last time.
Those on the left who took Russia’s side purely out of some contrarian anti-US imperialism position get the scorn they deserve.
I am much more concerned that misogynistic men are still abusing innocent and vulnerable women.
I know which one I want to see resolved first.
For all I know they thought his widgets were great but wanted to probe in other areas.
Who participated in actual slavery.
To describe a small exhibit asking you your opinions about the purpose of museums as "hectoring" sounds a bit odd to me. Your comment gives the impression that you usually feel "hectored" when visiting museums. Can you give us any more convincing examples?
You just don't get it. You haven't encountered Wokeness so you don't see how insidious, dispiriting and dangerous it can be
At least the Wellcome bollocks has shone a light
At the Surrealist exhibition at Tate Modern earlier this year (real life, not online), the info boards said the most ridiculous things - and they said them over and over again in an "I'm NOT LYING TO YOU" fashion - e.g. when André Breton cooperated with artists from e.g. Haiti or Africa, they said he didn't appropriate their outlook, or that perhaps he did appropriate their outlook to some extent but you've got to make your own mind up about that, and that was a different epoch from today's epoch of such huge respect for everything (especially if it's got a $ sign in front of it), blah blah F***ING blah. Talk about being patronising towards black people in the third world, because that's exactly what this was. Anybody who actually knows anything about Breton knows that he was an anti-colonialist all his life (since long before the Manifesto of the 121), absolutely not a racist of any kind, and the whole reason he got on well with artists in Haiti and Africa wasn't that he was appropriating anything but because he found that his outlook had something in COMMON with theirs, with regard to the unconscious. And why shouldn't it have? Two people both interested in something have a good natter, they learn from each other, they tell each other about what they themselves have been doing, maybe find something to cooperate on. There's no f***ing mystery there. The reason they wrote sh*t on those boards was because they felt they had to. I got the feeling they kinda assumed Breton was a white boy from a colonial mother country, with all the prejudices that for SOME people come with that, talking to black descendants of slaves, and that the colonial-colonised dichotomy must have been either dominant in his mind or determinant of most of his behaviour, or both, when, guess what, it wasn't. Not everyone from a colonial mother country only took their Klan robes off five minutes ago because they noticed the red light above the camera.
In short, there's a heck of a lot of racism hiding behind the "woke" cloak.
(I realise Breton also dealt in art and that he ran a gallery, but that seriously isn't something for the bods at TM to criticise, and it's got little to do with most of the art he actually made.)
"Can you demonstrate you have procedures in place to ensure there is no unlawful discrimination against ethnic minorities" can so easily be portrayed as widget manufacturers being coerced into a "war on woke" ...
“Taken by a friend at the Wellcome Collection. This is real.”
https://twitter.com/s8mb/status/1596880839711002630?s=46&t=OTxOvpdbAL3PiHIc5HsPrA
It’s quite open now. They want to tear down our culture and history. They admit it
Interesting counter intuitive strategy.
DISMANTLE WHITE INFRASTRUCTURE
From your posts, I can very easily believe that legal prohibitions against discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, sexual preferences and so on will rankle with you, and you will try to portray them at every opportunity as "woke". Protestations about "woke" are a very easy and lazy way of bigots trying to make their odious views less unacceptable.
Like if you don't do the accountancy or the costing or the factory environment (for the widgets as much as for the staff).
It's funny that for all the hostility to privileged cis white men throughout history they seem to make an exception for Karl Marx. Or just Marx if you prefer.
It might be in part because it does seem like an odd decision, hard to justify in the terms it has been presented, and plenty of people (like me) aren't quite sure how to react yet. I want to know a bit more about why they've taken this decision, and as a result am holding off sharing an opinion yet.
I'd find this blog a more valuable read this afternoon if I thought there was a chance of reasoned, considered responses from those who are concerned about this decision and its cultural impact, rather than a kneejerk scream of WOKE!!
(Honourable exception made for @Fairliered's comment - I thought you summed it up perfectly!)
Yep, "time's up, who needs all this old shit?"
https://twitter.com/ExploreWellcome/status/1596091211844313088
Shouldn’t he be cancelled?
Or people who live and work somewhere dare to take action against a measure that the authorities opposed on them?
That's not vandalism.
Perhaps turning the whole street into a prison is the solution.
Meanwhile, on the very same day, the British media gleefully report popular protests against lockdown in faraway China, mostly framing them as protests against the "zero covid policy".
Every sentence is a keeper.
If Wellcome think that the very idea of museums is exploitatively “re-centering the white cis-male body” they shouldn’t stop at one collection but simply close the doors full stop.
Imagine being working class - both repulsed and intrigued by Bentham’s skin, naturally - and hoping to learn more about Bentham and how his skin got there.
You’d come way shrugging, wondering why you wasted your bus fare.
How the West handed classical music over to China – and may not get it back
The sad truth is that among Britain’s upper echelons, the situation is very different from that of half a century ago. Now, classical music and opera arouse too much embarrassment or (worse) resentment and suspicion. An insider privy to the recent ACE funding talks tells me that there was palpable resentment towards Glyndebourne, Opera North and many orchestras. Furthermore, in the eyes of some, classical music and opera bear an ancestral guilt. They are fruits of the sins of Western society: its patriarchal and colonial mindset. The rules of tonal harmony are, these critics say, as oppressive as British rule in India, and have to be dismantled – witness the recent calls in universities to “decolonise” the music curriculum.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/classical-music/how-west-handed-classical-music-china-may-not-get-back/
Racist writers tend not to be consistently and 100% racist all the time. Case in point - Kipling. I have, somewhere, a complete works if I purchased in a second hand bookshop. His poetry and prose all mingled together.
In one story, he describes the inner thoughts and ideas of a poor Indian orphan girl with devastating humanity.
Practically over the page is an essay he wrote about going on patrol with the police in an Indian city. When they come across an English woman married to an Indian, his rant reads exactly like an article in Der Sturmer - all about race defilement.
The essay is no longer published. I have encountered people who don’t believe Kipling was racist because they have never read anything racist by him.
The Science Museum in London around the same time had a hands-on interactive machine in the cafe area where you could save babies by vaccinating them...quick, there's an ill baby you haven't vaccinated...oh dear, even more babies are getting ill now...quick, vaccinate them fast! Inject! Inject! My recollection is that may have had something to do with Wellcome.
Would you rather live in Oxford or China?
https://www.artybollocks.com/generator.html
They make things worse for buses and cyclists then claim it’s Green because it fucks up car drivers as well.
Some thoughts in response, in fairly random order:
1. IMO there are definitely some exhibits in some museums that are out-of-date and have little ongoing cultural value (I realise this is a value judgement). Sounds like Medicine Man might have been one of those. When I say I want to know more, I really want to know more about this exhibit, and how much cultural value it has.
2. Without knowing more than I do, I think there is valid criticism of exhibitions that started out essentially as repositories of one person's ego, which it sounds like Medicine Man did (i.e. I want to collect stuff, I don't know where to put it, oh I know, I'll con the local populace into paying to view it, even though the collection as a whole is incoherent and purely baed on what I could nick when I was on my foreign travels). Other museums are genuinely fascinating and add lots to our culture. Two local examples to evidence this for me: Bristol's 'We the curious' which is wonderful, compared to the Bristol Museum which is of so little cultural value that it could be shut tomorrow without anyone being any the worse off (I realise this is another value judgement).
3. The way in which Wellcome have made this announcement seems designed to provoke, and is disappointingly performative. From a relatively uninformed base I am tempted to agree with their central point (the collection tells more of a story of a man's wealth than it does a coherent cultural story) but the answer is to quietly modernise or transform it (which happens to museums all the time without anyone crying about the destruction of cultural heritage). The noise around this seems unhelpful.
We are a white country, with a white history, and the white elite hates us for that
It is genuinely quite bleak and depressing. And STILL there will be PB-ers claiming Woke is a bogeyman invented by the Right
Just read what Wellcome have said, it’s bonkers.
"So a well-loved and unique cultural attraction hired a director who explicitly aimed to destroy it in its historic form for essentially political reasons. More of this to come no doubt. Future appointments to key positions in the cultural bureaucracy will require close scrutiny"
https://twitter.com/surplustakes/status/1596863959444836359?s=20&t=p13oN65jQ1Agj7_q7z340Q
The Woke are at the gate. Their baying and howling can no longer be ignored
Canada!
You're previous post was clearly racist, and moronic.
That's what this is really about.
Instead of engaging, it seeks to exclude.
Instead of accessibility, it’s literally closing.
Instead of education, the idea is to shame.
My issue with the general “Tory” campaign against woke is that it doesn’t position itself in liberal values either. It’s just knockabout stuff to eke out coverage in the Mail.
We need a proper liberal critique of “woke”.
If only others shared your intelligence.
Time for you to go away and reflect
It's similar to the "Aryanising" of German institutions and culture in the 1930s. All officials and all institutions must keep to the message. In most cases the officials obey without question. If they're senior enough, they mustn't just keep to it: they must push it and make sure that others push it too. It doesn't matter whether they believe in it. Much of the time it contradicts itself anyway. Get them only to believe in power. That doesn't take long to achieve. They were already ¾ of the way there.
Sometimes it's preferable to choose absolute garbage to feed to people when there's a choice between absolute garbage and stuff that's only semi-garbage, for reasons that from a behavioural engineering POV - aka mind control - should be clear.
It's also similar to Stalinism in the USSR where there would be e.g. gatherings of officials where someone would spout some absolute sh*t about "workers' power" and everyone would clap and cheer, sometimes for 15 or 20 minutes, and they'd only stop when the leaders stopped, because if they stopped first they might get sent to a labour camp.
"They thought they were free", as Milton Mayer put it.