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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Privileged lives matter: the British opponents of cancel culture and their very debatable motives
I agree with Sarah https://t.co/NmY6jKBcyi
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And good morning one and all. It was good to get back to cricket in our small community yesterday. Sitting in the sun, sipping a pint of draught beer and watch the locals get back into the game made me feel a great deal better about the world. For a bit, anyway!
When the Chomsky/Rowling letter was published, several posters who imo are invariably right (or at least never completely wrong) thought it an important letter that should be a big concern for us all.
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of the letter I do not see the problem as significant outside of the twitter universe.
"Journalists are barred from writing on certain topics" - yet it has never been easier for journalists to write about and highlight exactly what they want to
"Heads of organisations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes"
"Editors are fired for running controversial pieces"
I asked across a couple of days for examples of the above, the only one anyone was willing to offer was a scientist who got "fired recently" for wearing a sexist t-shirt. Only he didnt get fired, and is still working there 6 years after the "recent" event took place.
Are either of the above really a great problem? If so it should be easy to list a half a dozen prominent examples of each? I am sure there will be some examples, but then bosses have always been fired, sometimes for good or bad reasons, and editors have always had a tension with their paymasters that occasionally causes sackings. There definitely is a real problem on twitter but then define it like that, dont claim it is a problem across wider society.
The reason I bring this back up, is that the problem is not just the establishment journalists on the right seeking to protect their position, the same sentiments are felt by those on the liberal and left flanks as well.
My explanation - they all spend too much time and energy on Twitter and conflate it with real life!
Betting PostGood morning, everyone.
F1: backed Bottas to win each wat at 4.6 (with boost). Green if he's 1st or 2nd.
Also backed Ocon and Ricciardo not to be classified at 3.1 and 3.5 (again with boost) based on Renault's 50% failure rate so far.
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2020/07/hungary-pre-race-2020.html
A grim day around the world yesterday with the highest number of infections recorded in a 24-hr period since the outbreak began.
And there is no doubt about the uptick in UK cases. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
The Sunday Telegraph have misreported Johnson's words, turning 'I don't want another lockdown' into 'We don't need another lockdown.' Vested interests are playing hard amongst the Telegraph writers. Their personal investment portfolios have been taking a hammering so they are doing everything to try and refloat the economy.
We are in big trouble in the UK. People still have a far too cavalier attitude to hygiene and masks. The correlation between such States and case surges is by now irrefutable.
3 or 4 weeks from now we will be in the midst of a crisis with a surge in cases, widespread panic and the beginning of blue sirens rushing the seriously ill into ICU. Without a lockdown it will be the worst that this country has known. Thousands of daily infections and a rampant virus in the community.
All part of the new tory plan.
(Whoever is admin: this post has a duplicate on Vanilla. And incidentally, posts occasionally turn up on Vanilla as “Template”, or are missing content altogether. PB really is a technical dinosaur: you must be missing lots of younger potential readers/contributors due to the unusability of the site.)
A discussion of the relation of 'libertarian' and 'liberal' would shed more light.
https://twitter.com/NickBuckleyMBE/status/1283818837830512642
The charities version is "Contrary to what has been said by others, our decision to terminate our relationship with Mr Buckley was not based on, nor influenced by, his personal blog posts, nor any social media comments or online petitions. As was made clear to Mr Buckley at the time, the board of trustees took the appropriate action to protect the charity’s reputation following legal advice and Charity Commission guidance".
We have no way of knowing which is correct.
The obvious question is: what are those reasons?
He founded the charity with his own redundancy and, from memory, ran it for a couple of decades to good effect.
I have absolutely no idea what the something else is.
PB is extremely sedate these days.
The cultish enthusiasm and complacent indulgence of this nonsense makes people very vulnerable to occupational vengeance should they have the temerity to have an opinion that is deemed heretical.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/world-europe-53415781
The ghost of Franco still stalks Iberia.
Ianal but would expect employment law would often make it difficult for organisations to disclose publicly why they sacked someone.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/princess-beatrices-reception-had-bouncy-22379088.amp
Barf.
I wouldn’t let the Duke of York anywhere near a bouncy castle. Especially when a sofa and copious amounts of alcohol are in the vicinity.
It is a fair point that employment law may prevent useful disclosure of information for deciding the exact state of play. The cultish Zeitgeist and intolerance of other views leading to nonsense like the Leader of the Opposition getting on his knees and submitting to re-education is certainly true, however.
Mr. Kinsella, it'll get relatively little attention because it's historically accurate but less politically fashionable than attacking the British Empire and indulging the new religion (especially the love of middle class white people self-flagellating to prove their virtue).
I can't see beyond a, frankly deliberate, conflation of three separate phenomena:
*small increases in R due to people mingling
*a Autumn/Winter peak due to significant changes in behaviour that comes with the colder, wetter weather
*looking at Spanish flu and thinking that was nailed on
Throw in a limited understanding of our own immunity mechanisms and ...
yeah.
I think its the former and I am not sure that I agree. What I am seeing is not a wider range of views but a somewhat hyperbolic conformism where expressing any reservations threatens to make you a non person or unacceptable. So, for example, not a single footballer has had the courage or freedom of thought to refuse to "take the knee" apparently in support of an organisation that wants to end the capitalist system that creates their pampered existence. Whether the mob agree with JK Rowling's views on transgenders or not should she really have been criticised so severely for expressing them?
I, like most comfortable, white, entitled people, have an instinctive aversion to the mob. And Twitter and the like seem to have given the mob more of a voice and more power than we have ever seen before. I really don't like this desperate need to conform. I think its dangerous. Its why I welcomed Boris refusing to sack Cummings in the face of that hysterical overreaction to his stupidity and selfishness. It's not that Cummings was right, he clearly wasn't, but that kind of power needs to be resisted.
None of this stops Toby Young from being a dick of course.
I am a fan of green politics but not Green party politics. No-one finds that hard to understand.
It is that simple.
Our household (currently, temporarily, six people) never use cash. The last time I actively handled any was after a party I needed to return a couple of heavy boxes of unused booze to Systembolaget, the state monopoly alcohol retailer (which is fantastic by the way, not least because of their extremely easy returns system). I was forced to rummage about in a dusty drawer trying to find a 5 or 10 kronor coin to use to unlock one of their trolleys.
I have maybe handled a banknote max five times in the last 12 months. All five having been given as birthday presents by very elderly people. Banknotes are universally considered a massive pain in the arse, and no local bank offices accept them.
One of the quaint, old-fashioned aspects of visiting other countries is re-acquainting yourself with cash. I still can’t believe that 1p, 2p and 5p coins still exist. Thank goodness for charity boxes!
To me, it was simply more that the American right need a culture war to get people out to vote. In the same way that Obama wasn't really coming for your guns, they need people to worry about free speech.
And regrettably, where the American right go, the British right follow.
JK Rowling, Margaret Attwood, Salman Rushdie, Noam Chomsky, et al are hardly conservatives.
None of that seems to have prevented a fairly robust debate pointing out how Black Lives Matter as an organisation carries rather more baggage than Black Lives Matter as a principle.
The term "slavery" can cover quite a wide variety of systems. You can have really brutal forms of chattel slavery, where people are just worked till they die, and get replaced, like 18th century Haiti. Or you can have systems where slaves are people, with some rights, not chattels. Quite a big litmus test for the brutality of slavery is whether children of slaves take the status of the mother or the father. If a master fathers a child on a slave, but the child is free (which I believe is common in West Africa), that's a powerful incentive to free the mother. If the child is a slave, it simply boosts the slave population.
https://twitter.com/edleonklinger/status/1284251419172909057
The irony being, it was bought him by his wife, so he would have something smart for the telly.... (I was told this by the project manager John Ellwood, who lives in Dartmouth).
Mr. Mark, I recall an online mob drove him to apologise for the temerity to wear a shirt he liked.
Big benefit for those on ventilators; the rest, not so much.
https://twitter.com/MartinLandray/status/1284157065498427393
ASSOCIATION OF INITIAL VIRAL LOAD IN SARS-CoV-2 PATIENTS WITH OUTCOME AND SYMPTOMS
https://ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S0002-9440(20)30328-X/fulltext
The dynamics of viral load (VL) of the 2019 novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and its association with different clinical parameters remain poorly characterized in the United States patient population. Herein we investigate associations between VL and parameters such as severity of symptoms, disposition (admission vs direct discharge), length of hospitalization, and admission to the intensive care unit, length of need for oxygen support and overall survival in a cohort of 205 patients from a tertiary care center in New York City. VL was determined using q-PCR and Log10 transformed for normalization. Univariate and multivariate regression models were used to test these associations. We found that diagnostic viral load is significantly lower in hospitalized patients than in patients not hospitalized (log10 VL = 3.3 vs.4.0; p=0.018) after adjusting for age, sex, race, BMI, and comorbidities. Higher VL was associated with shorter duration of the symptoms in all patients and hospitalized patients only and shorter hospital stay (coefficient =-2.02,-2.61, -2.18; p < 0.001, p=0.002, p=0.013, respectively). No significant association was noted between VL, admission to ICU, length of oxygen support, and overall survival. Our findings suggest a higher shedding risk in less symptomatic patients; an important consideration for containment strategies in SARS-CoV-2. Furthermore, we identify a novel association between viral load and history of cancer. Larger studies are warranted to validate our findings.
Of course, they could've just bloody sent out paper returns as worked perfectly well for the last decade in the first place...
We should also never miss an opportunty to raise the plight of Devon and Cornwall villagers, taken into slavery in the 1600's by Moorish corsairs. Perhaps they should have a statue?
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-england-cornwall-42515373/barbary-piracy-that-enslaved-thousands-culturally-erased
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Edric-Plague-Hero-Hornska-Book-ebook/dp/B07BN2W1L7/
So the 'convenience' of the shift is rather lost on me, I'm afraid.
That's why they have a very good team of lawyers working for them now, who have already helped several people be reinstated at work.
I joined when I was accused (totally baselessly) of racism by one or two regular posters on this forum just because I critiqued the wisdom of ripping down the statue of Edward Colston. In today's day and age that accusation alone ("the smell") can be enough for you to lose your job and livelihood, or severely inhibit your career. No employer would touch you with a bargepole. Hence, the legal protection is worth it.
I note that the author used to be anonymous on this forum himself until he reached a stage in his career where -being a very secure partner and only a few years from retirement - he felt it safe enough to come 'out' under his real name. And not be shy about saying what he really thought and what he thought about those who disagreed with him.
Fine - but don't assume those same privileged options are open to all of us who still rely on employment but aren't independently wealthy enough to be brave about it and dismiss those who aren't.
Contact Tracing during Coronavirus Disease Outbreak, South Korea, 2020
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article
There are caveats and potential confounding factors, but it’s unequivocal that older children are pretty good at spreading infection.
Sorry about that: Vanilla messing up quotations.
And for those who attack those who attack Mr Meeks it extends to those complaining about those complaining about those complaining about those complaining about cancellations.
Its simple really isn't it?
This is why historians talk about the Triangular Trade when discussing the history of slavery: Europeans (and Americans of European descent) sailed to Africa with ships loaded with trade goods, they bought African slaves from other Africans with the goods, carried the slaves off to work their plantations, and then shipped the goods from the plantations back to their population centres for sale. The value of the plantation goods vastly exceeded the price paid to purchase and feed the slaves, hence the massive profits generated.
People who talk about reparations tend not to mention either the Barbary trade or the sale of African slaves by other Africans. It suits them to simplify history and to portray pre-modern Africans uniformly as defenceless victims of the most appalling violence. The African slaves were, of course, defenceless victims of the most appalling violence. The many Africans who profited from taking and selling slaves, not so much.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/dominic-cummings-aims-rip-heart-22378127
This is at least the third time they've done this.
The dire warning about free speech at university are nail spittingly ignorant at best and deliberate lies at worst.
The NUS adopted no-platforming as an official position against racists in *checks notes* 1974. Legislation to force Universities to let people speak was passed in 1986, the University of Liverpool was sued under the law under to let South African diplomats speak.
Either the anti-cancel culture warriors are ignorant of this history or they know and are failing to mention there has been a mythical 'free speech' crisis at universities for the the last 50+ years.
"Cancel Culture" is a self-serving invention of privileged whining tossers who are upset that they no longer get to spout their reactionary cliched bollox free of heckle.
Well, you know, diddums.
There is more of a difficulty if your job is about expressing opinions. Organisations that claim to be non-partisan like the BBC can reasonably make it a condition of employment as a commentator that you don't express clear preference for one party or opinion or another - I think some of their senior people have sailed close to the wind on this and it does harm the organisation.
Beyond that, what it mostly comes down to is prominent people getting criticised. Some of the criticism may be unfair or unpleasant, and if it becomes abusive harassment there are laws against that too. Otherwise, it rather goes with the job. Some prominent journalists IMO go out of their way to whip it up, as it makes them more prominent.
by the way, I'm puzzled by Casino Royale saying that he joined the FSU because people, some of them up to recently anonymous, had been unfairly critical here. I try to be polite to everyone and I hope CR doesn't feel I've been slagging him off. I think his contributions here are interesting and we'd be poorer without them. But CR is himself anonymous. I don't see the risk to his career if someone attacks his pseudonym, even unfairly. I've taken somewhat greater risks over the years by not being anonymous, but as an MP I felt that went with the job too, and now I'm no longer an MP my opinions outside my special field of work are pretty irrelevant.
Opinium also had a best PM question in their poll ending on July 10th which had Boris Johnson leading the best PM metric by 3%.
Click the tables, tab V007.
https://www.opinium.com/resource-center/public-opinion-on-coronavirus-9th-july/
In short, as ever, wikipedia is often an inelegant source to rely on.