Ooh I'd missed the fact the UK has surpassed 100 doses per 100 population.
Great job the vaccine rollout. Something that has really gone well. 😀💉
Good spot.
It’s interesting to look at the shape of the graphs. Israel is stuck at 120% and USA a starting to level off at 90%, both demand related. Everywhere else is still going in roughly a straight line, except China which is accelerating (but mostly with the Sinovac dud).
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
Indeed. If you say that all white people are racist, then it’s not unexpected to find that the vast majority of white people, who aren’t racist, disagree with you.
Trying to import American views of race, with a long history of racial division well inside living memory, to other countries just doesn’t work. The USA need to sort out their own problems of violence and racism.
Interestingly, some of the worst aspects of US race discourse are driven by first or second generation immigrants who have no experience of the US's historical problems with race. The psychiatrist who recently spoke about fantasies of 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way' was the child of immigrants from Pakistan and attended an elite private school in Michigan.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
So it's specifically the 'taking a knee' that gets your goat then. You'd be ok with an anti-racist gesture where people stay on their feet.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
So it's specifically the 'taking a knee' that gets your goat then. You'd be ok with an anti-racist gesture where people stay on their feet.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 23m Replying to @iainmartin1 I agree. I won't be keen for my teenage kids to have the vaccine, even though I'm keen for my twenty-something kids to have it & even though my wife & I have had both doses.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
Indeed. If you say that all white people are racist, then it’s not unexpected to find that the vast majority of white people, who aren’t racist, disagree with you.
Trying to import American views of race, with a long history of racial division well inside living memory, to other countries just doesn’t work. The USA need to sort out their own problems of violence and racism.
Interestingly, some of the worst aspects of US race discourse are driven by first or second generation immigrants who have no experience of the US's historical problems with race. The psychiatrist who recently spoke about fantasies of 'unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way' was the child of immigrants from Pakistan and attended an elite private school in Michigan.
Doesn't surprise me and, more importantly, he doesn't probably mean it.
It's just another examples of narcissistic hyperbole crossing its way from the social media sphere into the real world and people being careless about the consequences of some people taking it literally, which some will.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
So it's specifically the 'taking a knee' that gets your goat then. You'd be ok with an anti-racist gesture where people stay on their feet.
How about 10 bunny hops and a forward roll?
Some star jumps would stop any anaerobic reaction after the warm up perhaps?
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
Those are still absolutely tiny numbers (yes, I know, exponential etc etc...). Are you saying that if deaths rise above 100 per week they should delay?
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
One straw that immediately leaps to hand is that the rise in both general occupance and mechanical ventilation beds is currently largely confined to the regions with the geographical hotspots: the North West and the East of England.
The huge challenge that Delta is experiencing in trying to explode out of there is making a massive difference. Need to build the vaccine wall higher as fast as we can. It's working.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
So it's specifically the 'taking a knee' that gets your goat then. You'd be ok with an anti-racist gesture where people stay on their feet.
I would, and I'd prefer still the sort of meaningful action @MaxPB describes.
During my refurb I've realised I have hundreds of books that have to go. Does anyone know of a charity that collects them? They're probably worth £200 or more, I'd happily give them away to get them off my back
The Oxfam in Bloomsbury used to be where I took surplus books that I'd already read.
Difficult one. That I am quite firm on. Oxfam puts many second hand bookshops out of business all for "charidee". Not saying it's wrong but that particular Oxfam bookshop has a "fine and rare" books section and would give most bookshops a run for their money.
It's a bugbear of mine for no apparent reason.
Much better to give them to Bookmarks over the road to help the socialists - they always have some second hand books outside the shop.
Agreed, also Oxfam has got severe governance issues around sexual abuse by workers. I wouldn't want to give them anything on that basis alone but it's a personal choice for @Leon. Though they might not accept 400 copies of The Ice Twins.
I hadn't actually thought of this. Charity shops as a rival to 2nd hand bookshops. I am all in favour of second hand bookshops, I love them from the leathery scent to the tottering shelves. I'd far rather have a 2nd hand bookshop on my high street than ANOTHER charity shop
The answer, it seems, is to give them to a 2nd hand bookshop, but the nearest is probably Charing X Road.
If they can collect, they can have. Deal
Try the independent public library in Primrose Hill though they can be a bit sniffy about what they accept. Then Oxfam in St Johns Wood high street have a bookshop.
In other, it's grim up north London news, the Finchley Road pavement extension has been banished and it is two lanes to the north now for cars.
FPT, I just noticed @Kinablu's well argued post saying why the Right won't win the culture wars. Two things that just wanted to highlight:
1. It's interesting that Kinablu's view is they see a victory for the Right in the culture wars as meaning we get such delights as mandatory statues to slave traders and so on. I can't speak for all but I would see a "victory" as meaning that all are equal and treated equally, and that we are viewed as individuals with our thoughts and ideas, and not that we are pigeon-holed into blocks that are supposed to think the same way, talk the same way etc based on our skin colour, secuality etc.
2. The idea that the advance of "progressive" ideas is always inevitable is also wrong. The best example of that is the promotion of Adult-Child relationships in the 1970s by the likes of PIE and their supporters. For the 1970s, "wokesters", it was the equivalent of the gender identity arguments of today. Needless to say, the former argument doesn't look so great 40+ years on.
Hello there Ed. Thanks for "well argued". Not sure it was really. Rather an impressionistic take. I view things more like a teenage girl does than the typical spocky middle-aged men who make the weather on this site. But there's nobody sharper in this world than a teenage girl, right? So it's adding value.
We are indeed all individuals with our own thoughts and ideas. And people certainly should not be stereotyped based on assumed group level characteristics. Nobody would disagree with this. So given you've put it out there I know for a fact you mean something more interesting, ie something which can be disagreed with. If you tell me what it is, I'll be able to do the disagreement.
The PIE point is the standard riposte to the "Today's Transphobes = Yesterday's Homophobes" argument, isn't it? But it doesn't rebut the argument, it reinforces it. Because inherent in there is the exact view - this yucky unnatural thing is a menace akin to and linked to pedophilia - that informed the suppression of gay people for so long (and still does in places).
I agree with you that ideas about how society should develop don't become certain to prevail merely by being badged "progressive". They have to enthuse enough people - and be accepted or tolerated by many many more - for this to happen. Which is what IS happening on this stuff we're talking about. It's clear that it is. Why else, despite all the Trumps and the Brexits and the Tory landslides, are people on the reactionary right so mad about how things are going?
Sorry Kinablu, I was off getting my second jab hence the delay. I certainly wouldn't had your argument down as a teenage girl's, I this that would have been slightly, erm, different
So, on point 1, what I meant is the Balkanisation of people into blocks who are supposed to think in a certain way. I know I have mentioned this before but Mrs Ed is African-American (with some Hispanic heritage) from California. Because of this, people - and 9/10 they are white liberals - pigeonhole her into the category "you are Black American, therefore you must vote Democrat etc". They are visibly shocked, and in one or two cases hostile, when she doesn't conform to that stereotype. For the CRT crowd, she would be a traitor and an Aunt Jemima but there is no reason why she should be - she is entitled to her views and think like an individual.
What gets me most about much of the discussion on race from a good few on the progressive left is that it is a bit like the constant warfare in 1984 - the aim is not to win by reaching a set goal, it is to have a insolvable conflict that continues to go on and on and which benefits those who are in control of the situation. In effect, they have no real interest in getting to an end point because that would then diminish their control.
Re the PIE / Gay marriage argument, the two are different, which is why there were different outcomes. Acceptance of Gay marriage rose rapidly when it was explained to people that it was a matter of fairness. It is really hard to argue that two adult people who love each other marry (and, yes, it is what I thought years and years ago). However, with PIE, what was realised is that it was a back door to exploitation.
Trans rights seems to sit somewhere in the middle - people are happy in accepting that people can say who they are, where they push back is when it is seen to be a situation open to potential abuse (people who identify as women using women's facilities) and / or children being allowed, or even encouraged, to take life changing decisions at an early age. There is also the matter that it is an active case of the state / medical profession treating the child as "communal property" rather than someone's child.
12,383 Delta variant identified: 464 - presented at Emergency Care 126 - hospitalised, of these: - 83 - unvaccinated - 28 - 1 dose - 3 - 2 doses
Huge protection against hospitalisation from 2 doses.
All the more so, because the double vaccinated people are the 50% of adults who are most vulnerable. You'd expect lower hospitalisation rates from the next 50%.
It's also worth remembering that a lot of the one dose people might well have gotten their jabs in the previous two or three weeks, in which case you wouldn't expect that much protection from the jab.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
Those are still absolutely tiny numbers (yes, I know, exponential etc etc...). Are you saying that if deaths rise above 100 per week they should delay?
The key thing for me is that when Boris said there was concern over the India variant four weeks ago there were ~980 people in hospital. Today there's ~930. The numbers in hospital have gone down, not up.
During my refurb I've realised I have hundreds of books that have to go. Does anyone know of a charity that collects them? They're probably worth £200 or more, I'd happily give them away to get them off my back
The Oxfam in Bloomsbury used to be where I took surplus books that I'd already read.
Difficult one. That I am quite firm on. Oxfam puts many second hand bookshops out of business all for "charidee". Not saying it's wrong but that particular Oxfam bookshop has a "fine and rare" books section and would give most bookshops a run for their money.
It's a bugbear of mine for no apparent reason.
Much better to give them to Bookmarks over the road to help the socialists - they always have some second hand books outside the shop.
Agreed, also Oxfam has got severe governance issues around sexual abuse by workers. I wouldn't want to give them anything on that basis alone but it's a personal choice for @Leon. Though they might not accept 400 copies of The Ice Twins.
I hadn't actually thought of this. Charity shops as a rival to 2nd hand bookshops. I am all in favour of second hand bookshops, I love them from the leathery scent to the tottering shelves. I'd far rather have a 2nd hand bookshop on my high street than ANOTHER charity shop
The answer, it seems, is to give them to a 2nd hand bookshop, but the nearest is probably Charing X Road.
If they can collect, they can have. Deal
Try the independent public library in Primrose Hill though they can be a bit sniffy about what they accept. Then Oxfam in St Johns Wood high street have a bookshop.
In other, it's grim up north London news, the Finchley Road pavement extension has been banished and it is two lanes to the north now for cars.
Ah the Finchley Road 'pavement extension' – say no more...
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
Those are still absolutely tiny numbers (yes, I know, exponential etc etc...). Are you saying that if deaths rise above 100 per week they should delay?
If deaths do rise above 100 a week this will give them cause for greater hesitation - they will have such a metric in mind, it may not necessarily be 100 a week.
It is likely that there will be some watering down of 'Freedom Day' even on the current trends so far, likely some relaxations eg increases in capacity in pubs and restaurants will be allowed 21 June, but still with masks when entering and moving around. Masks in shops and on public transport.
During my refurb I've realised I have hundreds of books that have to go. Does anyone know of a charity that collects them? They're probably worth £200 or more, I'd happily give them away to get them off my back
The Oxfam in Bloomsbury used to be where I took surplus books that I'd already read.
Difficult one. That I am quite firm on. Oxfam puts many second hand bookshops out of business all for "charidee". Not saying it's wrong but that particular Oxfam bookshop has a "fine and rare" books section and would give most bookshops a run for their money.
It's a bugbear of mine for no apparent reason.
Much better to give them to Bookmarks over the road to help the socialists - they always have some second hand books outside the shop.
Agreed, also Oxfam has got severe governance issues around sexual abuse by workers. I wouldn't want to give them anything on that basis alone but it's a personal choice for @Leon. Though they might not accept 400 copies of The Ice Twins.
I hadn't actually thought of this. Charity shops as a rival to 2nd hand bookshops. I am all in favour of second hand bookshops, I love them from the leathery scent to the tottering shelves. I'd far rather have a 2nd hand bookshop on my high street than ANOTHER charity shop
The answer, it seems, is to give them to a 2nd hand bookshop, but the nearest is probably Charing X Road.
If they can collect, they can have. Deal
Try the independent public library in Primrose Hill though they can be a bit sniffy about what they accept. Then Oxfam in St Johns Wood high street have a bookshop.
In other, it's grim up north London news, the Finchley Road pavement extension has been banished and it is two lanes to the north now for cars.
@Leon could give the whole lot to his daughter to flog on ebay, introducing her to the evils of capitalism and lifelong Tory-voting.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
If there's one thing politicians haev taught me it is that unity is fetishised - people say they are seeking it even when sides are taking diametrically opposed stances, or when it would be better to debate/argue and reach an outcome.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
Those are still absolutely tiny numbers (yes, I know, exponential etc etc...). Are you saying that if deaths rise above 100 per week they should delay?
If deaths do rise above 100 a week this will give them cause for greater hesitation - they will have such a metric in mind, it may not necessarily be 100 a week.
It is likely that there will be some watering down of 'Freedom Day' even on the current trends so far, likely some relaxations eg increases in capacity in pubs and restaurants will be allowed 21 June, but still with masks when entering and moving around. Masks in shops and on public transport.
As I was saying earlier, the big one is weddings. They need to relax the 30-people rule or face complete disaster for the industry and thousands of brides.
I suspect people can live with wearing masks on the Tube for a few more weeks, and when pottering around Sainsbury's. However, I favour a complete unlocking now – just get everyone jabbed. Get it done.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
One straw that immediately leaps to hand is that the rise in both general occupance and mechanical ventilation beds is currently largely confined to the regions with the geographical hotspots: the North West and the East of England.
The huge challenge that Delta is experiencing in trying to explode out of there is making a massive difference. Need to build the vaccine wall higher as fast as we can. It's working.
Indeed the NW is very much where the impact of Delta has been so far and the level of increase in cases there has been dramatic.
In other areas eg London the increase is much slower - Hancock etc will be hoping that we don't see an acceleration as we have seen in NW. It might happen.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
So it's specifically the 'taking a knee' that gets your goat then. You'd be ok with an anti-racist gesture where people stay on their feet.
How about 10 bunny hops and a forward roll?
Now you're talking!
Let's start at Goodison. Run on to some Taylor Swift and then that.
OT "our NHS" has just texted me that two local A&Es are back in full swing. All very laudable but I thought I was giving them my mobile number for vaccination purposes. Virtuous mission creep. Next they'll be using anti-terrorist laws to track down dog owners, except that already happened under Labour.
(1) BLM is a pretty unpleasant organisation with many goals that are (frankly) unpleasant and antidemocratic (2) There is still a lot of genuine racism in the US, particularly (but not exclusively) in the Southern States and particularly from law enforcement officers
There is a lot of the (justified) criticism of BLM. But the problem is that the people criticising BLM appear to be condoning (2). This therefore creates this false dichotomy: if you don't support BLM you are condoning racism.
The perception is heightened by the fact that a lot of people criticising BLM are so obsessed with it, that they don't seem to ever mention the real issues with racism in the US.
What there needs to be is an organisation that is genuinely seen as opposing racism, and supporting institutional change, that isn't saddled with the baggage of BLM.
Unfortunately (like with so many things) we've ended up incredibly polarised right now.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Indeed by being divisive, "taking the knee" has become a discussion in a way that more innocuous anti-racist campaigns in football over the years have not.
(1) BLM is a pretty unpleasant organisation with many goals that are (frankly) unpleasant and antidemocratic (2) There is still a lot of genuine racism in the US, particularly (but not exclusively) in the Southern States and particularly from law enforcement officers
There is a lot of the (justified) criticism of BLM. But the problem is that the people criticising BLM appear to be condoning (2). This therefore creates this false dichotomy: if you don't support BLM you are condoning racism.
The perception is heightened by the fact that a lot of people criticising BLM are so obsessed with it, that they don't seem to ever mention the real issues with racism in the US.
What there needs to be is an organisation that is genuinely seen as opposing racism, and supporting institutional change, that isn't saddled with the baggage of BLM.
Unfortunately (like with so many things) we've ended up incredibly polarised right now.
Interesting. So there are two strands to BLM:
1. The anti-racism; and 2. The crap.
Our football players have imported 1 and I'm sure have no clue (along with many in the UK and on PB and so what if they do it's a US thing) about 2.
In the 1990s I read the Joseph Wambaugh book ' the Blooding', about the infancy of criminal DNA testing and Colin Pitchfork in particular. Wambaugh paints a picture of what Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann were like before they crossed Pitchfork's path.
The parole board has decided that Colin Pitchfork can walk free. Just an observation: but the teenage girls he raped and murdered, Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann can't walk free. Why does 'life' for heinous rapes and murders not mean 'life'. I am not on the Priti Patel side of the justice fence, but one has to agree in this case maybe she has a point.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
As a casual observer of the whole BLM evolution (ie no idea) I hadn't thought that taking the knee itself was so charged. Well it seems to be by the people on here's reaction so that is interesting.
It just seemed to be a gesture and yes, any old gesture but one that was lifted from the US but we lift everything from the US.
If we are at the point where we say we are happy with a gesture against racism but not *that* gesture then I must say I am non-plussed.
Similar gestures can be charged with very different meanings.
If I hold up two fingers to you what I mean by it is very different dependent on which way round I hold my hand.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
As a casual observer of the whole BLM evolution (ie no idea) I hadn't thought that taking the knee itself was so charged. Well it seems to be by the people on here's reaction so that is interesting.
It just seemed to be a gesture and yes, any old gesture but one that was lifted from the US but we lift everything from the US.
If we are at the point where we say we are happy with a gesture against racism but not *that* gesture then I must say I am non-plussed.
Similar gestures can be charged with very different meanings.
If I hold up two fingers to you what I mean by it is very different dependent on which way round I hold my hand.
"Lessons have been learned" trans. No one has resigned, no one has been disciplined, no one has been sacked, and the tax payer will be paying your damages
Letter of apology sent from Lord Advocate to former #Rangers chief exec Charles Green and former director, Imran Ahmad. Both men now seeking millions in compensation.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
15% x 62m is quite a lot of people. And at the footie? Maybe more, maybe not. So still plenty of people to be told that the white and black and other footballers don't like racism.
Apart from THE KNEE how could you possibly object. If you are saying that the UK is not racist then fair enough but you are saying up to 10m people in this country are or could be racist.
So, we are now eight days away from freedom day in California: June 15th.
It's not *quite* complete freedom. And if you're not vaccinated, you're supposed to still wear a mask (yeah right).
But the core is that all capacity restrictions go, and everything is allowed to open.
There are two remaining restrictions:
1. At very large indoor events (more than 10,000 people) - i.e. basketball games - you are required to either be vaccinated or to have had a negative Covid test in the previous 72 hours.
2. Masks on public transport. (Not that we have much public transport in LA.) Which is, I suspect, a response to the fact that so many bus drivers got Covid here first time around.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
As a casual observer of the whole BLM evolution (ie no idea) I hadn't thought that taking the knee itself was so charged. Well it seems to be by the people on here's reaction so that is interesting.
It just seemed to be a gesture and yes, any old gesture but one that was lifted from the US but we lift everything from the US.
If we are at the point where we say we are happy with a gesture against racism but not *that* gesture then I must say I am non-plussed.
Similar gestures can be charged with very different meanings.
If I hold up two fingers to you what I mean by it is very different dependent on which way round I hold my hand.
But why is "the knee" so triggering?
Come on, Topping. We've explored this extensively today, and over recent months.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
Tom Newton Dunn @tnewtondunn · 2m Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans grants Mitchell's request for an emergency SO24 debate tomorrow on ODA, to last for three hours.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
You want it to support the latter but the reality is that it enables the former.
And you're conveniently ignoring that, IMO, the knee has trivialised the struggle for racial equality. It simply glosses over everything. Footballers are taking the knee and racists are booing them is the story now. When the fuck do we get the politicians to notice glass ceilings, job application discrimination or grooming of black youths into criminal and violent gangs? Instead all we get is bullshit about who is and isn't taking the knee and endless rubbish about whether fans are all racists.
A sign of when @Gallowgate is rattled - when he knows, secretly, deep down, his opponents have a point - is when he reels off repetitive reply after reply to anyone who disagrees with him minute by minute.
It's tickled something emotional within him, and his rational brain is struggling to engage with it.
I think that his "opponents" do have a point as we are witnessing on here. People think that taking the knee is divisive and woke and supporting a marxist agenda and they don't like it as apart from anything else it distracts from Op. Trident-type activities.
All well and good.
But consider that instead of all that it is simply further emphasis on not putting up with racism. I have no idea what the BLM manifesto is and I doubt you do either. It is entirely possible that the "politics" gets lost or fritters away and you are left with footballers, who play in an environment of total multiculturalism (in the UK at least) on field, and let's say a questionable environment of racism/non-racism off field on what were the terraces. And those footballers, white, black and the rest, are making a strong statement about their views on racism.
I don't think that is worthy of getting quite so het up about. I'm all for it. If it affects clubs' revenue then fine. If someone is going to kick off (in a pub, or at a ground) about it, then I am tempted to say bring it.
That's why I think an alternative anti-racist gesture, such as standing & linking arms against discrimination on the pitch, and more action by social media firms against racist abuse online is necessary.
Target the racism, and do it effectively. Don't stoke the culture wars.
That would also be a meaningless gesture.
There is literally no difference between the meaningless gesture of kneeling and the meaningless gesture of linking arms.
It's just one "side" has irrationally decided it doesn't like kneeling.
Gestures are mostly a waste of time. Reasoned argument is better. I'm not a fan of the Remembrance Day celebrations for the same reason.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
It is. Absolutely it promotes division as it's a "if you don't do this you're a racist" kind of thing. If you don't like the knee you're a racist. If you don't wear a poppy you're a traitor. It's all part of the same bullshit divisiveness.
Yes that is a good point.
If being woke is being anti-racist, then the obverse must be that if you are not woke you are pro-racist. Which is bollocks.
But can we not look at taking the knee on the football pitch and just judge it to be an anti-racism message? No one has to "do" anything. They just see a bunch of blokes displaying the fact that they don't like racism, in an environment (the footie) that has historically been riven with racism. And other isms for that matter.
I think if they picked a different empty gesture that wasn't so charged and related to the US it might be better. The problem with the knee, IMO, is that it feels accusatory of all of us as being racists like Americans or accuses British culture of accepting racial violence by the police as it is in some parts of the US. Ultimately I think that's the issue, people who aren't racist feel like they're being accused of being racist specifically by the knee gesture. Another one probably wouldn't do that.
As a casual observer of the whole BLM evolution (ie no idea) I hadn't thought that taking the knee itself was so charged. Well it seems to be by the people on here's reaction so that is interesting.
It just seemed to be a gesture and yes, any old gesture but one that was lifted from the US but we lift everything from the US.
If we are at the point where we say we are happy with a gesture against racism but not *that* gesture then I must say I am non-plussed.
Similar gestures can be charged with very different meanings.
If I hold up two fingers to you what I mean by it is very different dependent on which way round I hold my hand.
But why is "the knee" so triggering?
People being triggered by "the knee" are as odd as those being triggered by the British flag.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
There needs to be a switch to campaigning for SPECIFIC measures to combat racism that can be debated on their merits. In the UK effective equality before the law has been achieved with a lot of legislation outlawing discrimination.
The rise of aggressive identity politics is threatening progress in my opinion. Eventually all ethnic groups including "white" will be provoked into a divisive and sectarian outlook that will undermine social cohesion and willingness to make sacrifices to improve the lot of others.
Many of the so-called left (pseudo left, really) are participants in politics as a recreational sport aiming to defeat the opposition above all else. They are guilty of "overshoot". They need the struggle to continue a bit like ASH on smoking. Temporary and transient unequal outcomes are seized upon as proof that society is racist and this must be eliminated by impractical and self-defeating measures. We are within the grasp of evolving into a relaxed multi-racial society and these narcissistic zealots will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
There needs to be a switch to campaigning for SPECIFIC measures to combat racism that can be debated on their merits. In the UK effective equality before the law has been achieved with a lot of legislation outlawing discrimination.
The rise of aggressive identity politics is threatening progress in my opinion. Eventually all ethnic groups including "white" will be provoked into a divisive and sectarian outlook that will undermine social cohesion and willingness to make sacrifices to improve the lot of others.
Many of the so-called left (pseudo left, really) are participants in politics as a recreational sport aiming to defeat the opposition above all else. They are guilty of "overshoot". They need the struggle to continue a bit like ASH on smoking. Temporary and transient unequal outcomes are seized upon as proof that society is racist and this must be eliminated by impractical and self-defeating measures. We are within the grasp of evolving into a relaxed multi-racial society and these narcissistic zealots will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
I would take issue with 'effective equality before the law has been achieved'. No it hasn't. Legislation providing equity before the law and outlawing discrimination does not, of itself, stop inequitable application of the laws, or even inequitable outcomes. We see these all the time. Which is why you must look not only at the equality under the letter of the law, but equality under the impact of the law.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
There needs to be a switch to campaigning for SPECIFIC measures to combat racism that can be debated on their merits. In the UK effective equality before the law has been achieved with a lot of legislation outlawing discrimination.
The rise of aggressive identity politics is threatening progress in my opinion. Eventually all ethnic groups including "white" will be provoked into a divisive and sectarian outlook that will undermine social cohesion and willingness to make sacrifices to improve the lot of others.
Many of the so-called left (pseudo left, really) are participants in politics as a recreational sport aiming to defeat the opposition above all else. They are guilty of "overshoot". They need the struggle to continue a bit like ASH on smoking. Temporary and transient unequal outcomes are seized upon as proof that society is racist and this must be eliminated by impractical and self-defeating measures. We are within the grasp of evolving into a relaxed multi-racial society and these narcissistic zealots will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Though no sign of the Government implementing the recommendations of its own recent flawed and controversial report into racial discrimination. Its almost as if they are not interested in doing anything.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Not sure where you get 860 from? Looks like 805 in England?
That's about as close to unanimous as we are ever going to get I think. Those Tories threatening their government with a defeat in the Commons should take note, they really should.
Having said that if the government undertook to make up the "shortfall" by donating vaccines of a value of 0.2% of GDP or frankly even more I would very much welcome this. We are going to be drowning in vaccines by the Autumn even at our currently disappointing rate of distribution and we are already committed to pay for them.
In the 1990s I read the Joseph Wambaugh book ' the Blooding', about the infancy of criminal DNA testing and Colin Pitchfork in particular. Wambaugh paints a picture of what Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann were like before they crossed Pitchfork's path.
The parole board has decided that Colin Pitchfork can walk free. Just an observation: but the teenage girls he raped and murdered, Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann can't walk free. Why does 'life' for heinous rapes and murders not mean 'life'. I am not on the Priti Patel side of the justice fence, but one has to agree in this case maybe she has a point.
This case is very much in line with a 'whole life tariff' by today's standards. (Murder of two or more persons each involving a sexual element). There are very few whole life prisoners. The system would struggle to deal with large numbers of people who are in prison but have nothing to lose by any further actions.
From Malmesbury's data, a sharp rise in cases in some places like Cheshire, South Ribble, Preston etc - cases overflowing from the hotspots in Lancashire?
Not that it affects the reasons why lifting lockdown is appropriate.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
About 25% of the country are determined to hear only that. Even if someone says explicitly they support black lives matter the slogan not the organisation, as nearly all high profile footballers have done, the 25% will still deem them to be supporting the organisation.
It is strange behaviour, not sure what the solution is.
Politico.com - How 2 new Republicans want to reshape the GOP's immigration agenda Florida Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez are somewhat lonely voices as their party takes an increasingly hard line on the border.
. . . . Florida Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez are somewhat lonely voices in the GOP, in part because the migration influx soon after President Joe Biden took office gave Republicans an opening to paint Democrats as soft on the border. But Salazar and Giménez are promoting separate frameworks to overhaul the nation's flawed immigration system that could help their party build on the surprising inroads former President Donald Trump made with Latino voters last fall.
Both of them toppled Democratic incumbents on their way to winning last fall. And both freshmen want to see Republicans embrace a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently residing in the U.S. — albeit paths that are harder to walk than Biden and Democrats would want.
Their work to win more GOP buy-in for a comprehensive immigration plan is made more complicated, however, by the party's attraction to blunt-force messaging on border security as the Biden administration grapples with the issue.
“The problem with the border is, it's an urgency that has overshadowed the importance of us giving some type of dignity or some type of resolution to those people who have been here for more than 10 years,” Salazar said in an interview. “We're talking about 11 million people that are waiting for an answer.”
. . . . "I am a brown girl from the ‘hood, who is a Republican, who is coming to tell my party that it’s time to wake up and smell the votes," she said in February after challenging ultra-conservative Trump adviser Stephen Miller on the matter during a closed-door meeting.
. . . . Giménez, a former Miami-Dade mayor, has offered a less sweeping overhaul that would still represent a huge step forward for the post-Trump GOP. His proposal would allow undocumented immigrants already working in the U.S. to pursue a pathway to citizenship by applying through their country of origin, without having to return to their countries to do so. Gimenez's plan would effectively sweep them into the current system without putting them ahead of anyone else seeking legal immigration status.
“To me that's a much simpler way," Giménez said in an interview. "Different countries have different quotas. Some people may make it to citizenship and some people may not, but I'll tell you what — I think that most of the undocumented immigrants here, all they want to do is go out in the light."
“There's a practical impossibility to deporting them,” he added. “They're a productive part of our society for the most part." . . . .
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
The problem as you say is the 15% (probably higher, but whatever) of racists. You should train your fire on them, not on the people who are sick of having their lives blighted by them and are taking a stand. The fact that you are so triggered by the latter, and so complacent about the former, is ridiculous.
It's a Monday - so waiting on a oat of hospital admission and other data. Tuesday is the day, as ever.
One thing though.
Cases are rising in the 15-44 group. Indeed, nearly all of the rise is happening there.
0-14 is basically flat. The narrative that there are large amount of school based infections seems improbable - unless there is a massive differential in the 15-18 age group.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
About 25% of the country are determined to hear only that. Even if someone says explicitly they support black lives matter the slogan not the organisation, as nearly all high profile footballers have done, the 25% will still deem them to be supporting the organisation.
It is strange behaviour, not sure what the solution is.
Ignore the 25% (if that) and keep doing the right thing.
Just as there's about 25% (if that) of the country that see the country's flag and think its extremists or fascists etc behind the flag.
Ignore the weirdos who take offence because they want to and move on.
Of course you would sue had Ascot not taken adequate precautions and you caught Covid 19... but at the moment you just think its a pain. You really should thank Ascot.
OT "our NHS" has just texted me that two local A&Es are back in full swing. All very laudable but I thought I was giving them my mobile number for vaccination purposes. Virtuous mission creep. Next they'll be using anti-terrorist laws to track down dog owners, except that already happened under Labour.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
In the 1990s I read the Joseph Wambaugh book ' the Blooding', about the infancy of criminal DNA testing and Colin Pitchfork in particular. Wambaugh paints a picture of what Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann were like before they crossed Pitchfork's path.
The parole board has decided that Colin Pitchfork can walk free. Just an observation: but the teenage girls he raped and murdered, Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann can't walk free. Why does 'life' for heinous rapes and murders not mean 'life'. I am not on the Priti Patel side of the justice fence, but one has to agree in this case maybe she has a point.
Yes, she does, and in any case it is a natural human reaction to find the sexual murders of children particularly abhorrent. On the other hand, do I want to live in a society without the possibility of redemption? Another reason I am not in politics.
As well as the Wambaugh book mentioned, the television drama Code of a Killer about the case and the development of DNA profiling is probably available on various streaming platforms. It is curious that Alec Jeffreys did not win a Nobel Prize, though Kary Mulis did for inventing the PCR technique used in DNA profiling and, of course, Covid testing.
Of course you would sue had Ascot not taken adequate precautions and you caught Covid 19... but at the moment you just think its a pain. You really should thank Ascot.
Not at all. I'm a grown up and fully vaccinated. And we are the tail end of a pandemic. Oh and I went to Cheltenham last March and a ram packed point to point last week.
I understand the risks and if I'm going to go to a large public gathering I know them even more. I wouldn't sue anyone if I went voluntarily and wound up with Covid which is and will continue to be a small but non-zero risk.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
Abso-blood-lutely.
Do you know what? If Sky had the balls come out and say that it was their intention to undermine a left-wing Marxist organisation that’s doctrine is batshit crazy by appropriating the phrase “black lives matter”, then I’d have a lot of respect for them.
Re: books, last time yours truly had to move was compelled - or granted golden opportunity? - to disposed of a LOT of books. Which I did over the course of a month or so, shopping them around to a wide variety of book-mongers here in Seattle. Goal being to maximize my $$$ but still getting ride of everything I wished to get rid of (still kept a lot!)
Got pretty good money for select few, not bad return for lots more, pretty much a pittance for many - and was able to dump the rest at a place gave what they didn't want to a worthy charity.
However, that was before the internet - NOT thrift stores - hollowed out the used book shops thus greatly reducing their number in Seattle and other places (not sure about London).
Have bought books at Skoobs.
One key thing that Leon mentioned re: his stash, it that he would like someone to come a get them, which does change the equation. When I did my great cull-out, did have some book buyers come and make offers on what they fancied. But in the end flogged & schlepped most of them myself. Including borrowing a big panel van to haul the final load to the "we take everything but pay little if anything" place.
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
Abso-blood-lutely.
Do you know what? If Sky had the balls come out and say that it was their intention to undermine a left-wing Marxist organisation that’s doctrine is batshit crazy by appropriating the phrase “black lives matter”, then I’d have a lot of respect for them.
Not holding my breath, though.
How many people do you think know that BLM is a left-wing Marxist organisation?
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
If we assume 9 days between case by specimen date & hospital admission.... then over past month around 5% of UK cases have resulted in a UK hospitalization. Adjusting that forwards based on current case numbers and you would get to around 300 UK admissions/day, with potential to keep rising of course.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
OT "our NHS" has just texted me that two local A&Es are back in full swing. All very laudable but I thought I was giving them my mobile number for vaccination purposes. Virtuous mission creep. Next they'll be using anti-terrorist laws to track down dog owners, except that already happened under Labour.
Are you sure that's from the vaccinations?
I've been getting some texts like that for the last couple of years, not very often but about once every 4-6 months I'll get a text out of the blue about the local A&E etc
No idea where they got my number from to do so. Maybe from the GP?
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
About 25% of the country are determined to hear only that. Even if someone says explicitly they support black lives matter the slogan not the organisation, as nearly all high profile footballers have done, the 25% will still deem them to be supporting the organisation.
It is strange behaviour, not sure what the solution is.
Ignore the 25% (if that) and keep doing the right thing.
Just as there's about 25% (if that) of the country that see the country's flag and think its extremists or fascists etc behind the flag.
Ignore the weirdos who take offence because they want to and move on.
I agree it is quite similar to the opposite group who conflate patriotism and racism. A failure to listen.
I wouldn't bother going. All 35 races to be shown on both free-to-air as well as Sky Sports Racing. Much cheaper to enjoy the meeting from home with your own refreshments and no need to wear the Morning Dress (unless you really want to).
I'd rather spend an afternoon's racing at Lingfield to be honest.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
If we assume 9 days between case by specimen date & hospital admission.... then over past month around 5% of UK cases have resulted in a UK hospitalization. Adjusting that forwards based on current case numbers and you would get to around 300 UK admissions/day, with potential to keep rising of course.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
If we assume 9 days between case by specimen date & hospital admission.... then over past month around 5% of UK cases have resulted in a UK hospitalization. Adjusting that forwards based on current case numbers and you would get to around 300 UK admissions/day, with potential to keep rising of course.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
I think it’s inevitable sadly
The rise in cases is nearly all in the 15-44 group
Black lives don't matter so much to other blacks - if they get in the way of a drug deal going down....
Compare and contrast with the number of statements and pieces of footage on YouTube if she had been shot by a white cop. Just sayin'....
Thats why I hate the Black Lives Matter nonsense. When a black person kills another black person which in this Country is a 1000 times more likely than a black person getting killed by a Police Officer it does not matter. There were huge protests about police brutality last year and the taking the knee stuff goes on. Why are there no protests about black kids killing other black kids? That seems to be ok. I just don't get it.
OK boomer
Was there something incorrect in what I wrote?
Literally the whole thing
Hmm, there's always a deafening silence when one young black man kills another one over gang related issues. It's almost like this is an acceptable crime, which it isn't. There's a hypocrisy within BLM and plenty of other virtue signalling organisations that will shout from the rooftops about perceived racial injustice but do an Arsene Wenger when it comes to black men killing each other in gang related disputes.
I'm sure those who take the knee etc are very much supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence.
However if you want to push this ridiculous point, I don't exactly see the "taking the knee doesn't do anything to address racial injustice crowd" doing much to address black on black violence themselves.
They must be total hypocrites too, right?
Do you think so? I don't. I think most people taking the knee just don't want to be seen as racist. I doubt many of them actually care otherwise they'd be using their considerable fame to raise these issues. Instead they do the gesture, hope to go unnoticed and condemn some idiots booing them. There are a few notable exceptions of course.
Anyway, you brought taking the knee into this, I didn't. I've made it clear time and again my issue with the whole bullshit about taking the knee is it lets everyone off the hook. They take the knee do the gesture and nothing changes but because they took the knee they're off the hook.
I don't know what the answers are to gang violence, but it doesn't start with taking the knee and it certainly doesn't end there as most people would like to pretend.
Why wouldn't they be supportive of charities and movements addressing black on black violence? Seems like wishful thinking to me to justify irrational hatred of those who do engage in the black lives matter movement.
Nobody is saying 'taking the knee' is going to change anything but that isn't a reason to dislike it. The call should be "black lives do matter, so what are you going to do about it", rather than "boo you woke liberal bastards". The former is constructive, the latter is laughable.
I'm not saying you're the latter, but plenty of people are.
I just don't think they actually care. Have any of them raised the issue? Have they talked about it in interviews? I haven't seen anything other than blaming gang violence on white people and intersectionality or some other bullshit idea.
I think you'll find that plenty of people think taking the knee is more than an empty gesture when it is in fact the emptiest of empty gestures. Especially in the UK.
Non-white people in the UK face a completely different type of adversity than black people in the US. The whole idea of BLM is just ridiculous in a UK context. Police in the UK aren't going around gunning down black men and women.
We need to talk about serious issues like the glass ceiling in the public sector for Black and Asian people, about discrimination in the job application process, about ensuring that black kids aren't being groomed by gangs to carry out acts of violence and other criminal behaviour.
The knee is a completely shallow and empty gesture that turns a real and complicated problem for black and other non-white people into something that can now be ignored as woke bullshit because they keep banging on about something that simply isn't an issue in this country - police killing black people - and they won't admit that it's not an issue.
"black lives matter" is literally apolitical by definition.
Empty gesture or not, it's still entirely appropriate in a UK context, even if it's not particularly effective at solving anything.
No it isn't. BLM is a political organisation that says the main issue for black people in the UK is police violence and it can be resolved with a Marxist revolution. It's a hateful organisation with people at the top who hate white people. They are driven by their hatred of whites (and Jews and Indians) not by some sense of injustice against black people.
The knee is a personal choice, I think it doesn't achieve anything at all. And I say that as someone who isn't white and has faced plenty of my own adversity both in the workplace and from the police. It's an empty gesture which trivialises the ongoing struggle for racial equality and has become counter-productive.
Black Lives Matter is a political organisation.
Black lives matter is a movement.
Taking the knee supports the latter not the former. To suggest otherwise is just intellectually dishonest.
The mistake was to have black lives matters on the shirts and on Sky Sports. You say it has nothing to do with the organisation, I say it's silly to use as a slogan the name of a far-left political movement.
Stick "kick it out" on all of the shirts and there wouldn't be nearly so much of a problem.
Kick It Out was a very good campaign which has moved football on a long way, from the days when the likes of John Barnes got taunted by monkey noises from England fans.
BLM is deliberately divisive, and is going to be met with boos when the stadiums are full.
It's going to be met with cheers too. So what is your point?
There was a lot of racism in football when Kick it Out first started. I bet the PB of the day would have accused it of being virtue signalling and divisive.
Nope, I was all in favour of Kick It Out, it’s pretty much eliminated racism in football stadia.
BLM is very different. It’s promoting division rather than seeking to eliminate it.
I'm sorry but it's just wrong to say that BLM is promoting division. Just plain wrong.
Judging by today’s thread it seems to have produced division, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Every movement that tries to change prevailing attitudes or laws will create division. People forget that at the time the US civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were unpopular with white Americans, and even some black Americans, who accused them of stoking division. Similarly with the suffragettes or even the abolitionists. More recently the gay rights movement faced absolutely vitriolic condemnation from much of the British press well within my lifetime, but look how successfully they have managed to transform social attitudes. It would be nice if there was more widespread support for what the BLM movement is trying to achieve, but the fact that there isn't just confirms why it is necessary in my view.
Brilliant: if there's widespread support for the BLM movement then that proves it's captured the zeitgeist; if not then that just proves why it's needed. At no point is any criticism valid.
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
How is footballers taking a knee to banish racism that they experience and have been objecting to for years since before any of us had heard of BLM an "extreme solution"?
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
Abso-blood-lutely.
Do you know what? If Sky had the balls come out and say that it was their intention to undermine a left-wing Marxist organisation that’s doctrine is batshit crazy by appropriating the phrase “black lives matter”, then I’d have a lot of respect for them.
Not holding my breath, though.
How many people do you think know that BLM is a left-wing Marxist organisation?
How is that relevant? You agreed with what Philip Thompson said and all I said was that I’d have a lot of respect if Sky actually said that that is what they are doing.
In reality, Philip is just projecting what he wishes the reality to be. Sky and the PL started this whole thing as being about black lives matter but have then tried to turn it into something broader. Sky could have dropped the BLM branding, but they won’t. If they want to disassociate it with the political organisation, then I’d suggest they should explicitly state that they do not approve of BLM’s politics.
I wouldn't bother going. All 35 races to be shown on both free-to-air as well as Sky Sports Racing. Much cheaper to enjoy the meeting from home with your own refreshments and no need to wear the Morning Dress (unless you really want to).
I'd rather spend an afternoon's racing at Lingfield to be honest.
Not sure the point of Ascot is really the racing (although it’s an interesting ancillary activity)
OT "our NHS" has just texted me that two local A&Es are back in full swing. All very laudable but I thought I was giving them my mobile number for vaccination purposes. Virtuous mission creep. Next they'll be using anti-terrorist laws to track down dog owners, except that already happened under Labour.
Are you sure that's from the vaccinations?
I've been getting some texts like that for the last couple of years, not very often but about once every 4-6 months I'll get a text out of the blue about the local A&E etc
No idea where they got my number from to do so. Maybe from the GP?
All those dodgy sites you visit have been compromised, I’m afraid.
I see the impending arrival of GB News has got the age-old debate about partiality going.
I'm curious as to what this notion of "balanced" news coverage looks like. I always thought in a democracy the Government of the day should be subject to scrutiny, to account - questions should be asked and answers given and those answers should be challenged if they are evasive or irrelevant.
Are we suggesting Government should not be held to account?
The balance comes by holding the Opposition to account as well, not for what they have done because they aren't in power but about what they would do. It's perfectly reasonable, it seems to this observer, to both challenge the Government about what it has done, is doing and will do and challenge the Opposition on what they would do.
I don't see why either Government or Opposition should be allowed a "free pass" and if journalistic scrutiny is annoying both sides, it's probably doing a good job.
Naturally the Government will face the greater scrutiny because they are the ones in power - they have a record to defend and to which they should be held to account.
During my refurb I've realised I have hundreds of books that have to go. Does anyone know of a charity that collects them? They're probably worth £200 or more, I'd happily give them away to get them off my back
I have a similar issue, as I need to clear space for better, more worthy books. All charity shops sell second hand books, but doubt they want dozens dumped on their doorsteps.
Oh do tell what some of the worse, less worthy books are.
So far as relevant s3 of the International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Act 2015 provides that in the event the target is not met in any given year the Secretary of State must put a statement before the Commons as soon as practicable. It goes on::
(3) A statement under subsection (1) or (2) must explain why the 0.7% target has not been met in the report year and, if relevant, refer to the effect of one or more of the following— (a) economic circumstances and, in particular, any substantial change in gross national income; (b) fiscal circumstances and, in particular, the likely impact of meeting the target on taxation, public spending and public borrowing; (c) circumstances arising outside the United Kingdom. (4) A statement under subsection (1) must also describe any steps that the Secretary of State has taken to ensure that the 0.7% target will be met by the United Kingdom in the calendar year following the report year.
As the Sol Gen pointed out this morning it is therefore not technically true to say that it would be "illegal" to cut the aid budget because the Act imposing the target already allows for such a possibility. I don't think knocking up a statement covering points (a), (b) and (c) would be too tricky.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
If we assume 9 days between case by specimen date & hospital admission.... then over past month around 5% of UK cases have resulted in a UK hospitalization. Adjusting that forwards based on current case numbers and you would get to around 300 UK admissions/day, with potential to keep rising of course.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
Not really. There's been a month now of the India variant and there's fewer people in hospital than there were a month ago.
Yes case numbers are rising, amongst people who aren't likely to end up in hospital. However vaccination rates are going up too.
There's currently about 6k cases per day and over 600k vaccinations per day. For every single case there's a hundred vaccinations happening. While cases are going up, the numbers of people who are unvaccinated are going down faster than cases are going up.
Hospital occupancy trends starting to look a little ominous. From bobbing around in the upper 700s in England, we've seen a jump to 860 over the weekend.
Still very low, but we know how exponential increases can get. I had been hoping we wouldn't see something like that, but the three days of data just released after the weekend aren't as encouraging as I'd have hoped. Especially in the North West (up to 245 from 184 a week earlier and a low of 142 on the 18th of May).
Number in mechanical ventilation beds in England now no longer in the 110-120 region as it had been with a couple of blips upwards; now up at 133 (latest four days: 119, 124, 131, 133).
Of course, with numbers this low, it can be skewed by a number of households who were dodging vaccinations, so not cause for panic at all. Just possibly cause for keeping attention on them.
I do think that these (coupled with vaccination numbers) are the key metric, over and above hospital admissions, and far more so than cases numbers.
Daily cases will probably get to around 10,000 by early next week.
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
In England, in hospital:
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
If we assume 9 days between case by specimen date & hospital admission.... then over past month around 5% of UK cases have resulted in a UK hospitalization. Adjusting that forwards based on current case numbers and you would get to around 300 UK admissions/day, with potential to keep rising of course.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
I think it’s inevitable sadly
There are 1,200 hospitals in the UK, so 300 / day is roughly one admission per hospital every four days?
Comments
It’s interesting to look at the shape of the graphs. Israel is stuck at 120% and USA a starting to level off at 90%, both demand related. Everywhere else is still going in roughly a straight line, except China which is accelerating (but mostly with the Sinovac dud).
As you say, the Government will be more focussed on total hospital occupancy - will it go above 1,000 - and also death rate per WEEK - will it go above 100? (Currently 59).
Too early to call this.
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
23m
Replying to
@iainmartin1
I agree. I won't be keen for my teenage kids to have the vaccine, even though I'm keen for my twenty-something kids to have it & even though my wife & I have had both doses.
It's just another examples of narcissistic hyperbole crossing its way from the social media sphere into the real world and people being careless about the consequences of some people taking it literally, which some will.
The huge challenge that Delta is experiencing in trying to explode out of there is making a massive difference. Need to build the vaccine wall higher as fast as we can. It's working.
In other, it's grim up north London news, the Finchley Road pavement extension has been banished and it is two lanes to the north now for cars.
So, on point 1, what I meant is the Balkanisation of people into blocks who are supposed to think in a certain way. I know I have mentioned this before but Mrs Ed is African-American (with some Hispanic heritage) from California. Because of this, people - and 9/10 they are white liberals - pigeonhole her into the category "you are Black American, therefore you must vote Democrat etc". They are visibly shocked, and in one or two cases hostile, when she doesn't conform to that stereotype. For the CRT crowd, she would be a traitor and an Aunt Jemima but there is no reason why she should be - she is entitled to her views and think like an individual.
What gets me most about much of the discussion on race from a good few on the progressive left is that it is a bit like the constant warfare in 1984 - the aim is not to win by reaching a set goal, it is to have a insolvable conflict that continues to go on and on and which benefits those who are in control of the situation. In effect, they have no real interest in getting to an end point because that would then diminish their control.
Re the PIE / Gay marriage argument, the two are different, which is why there were different outcomes. Acceptance of Gay marriage rose rapidly when it was explained to people that it was a matter of fairness. It is really hard to argue that two adult people who love each other marry (and, yes, it is what I thought years and years ago). However, with PIE, what was realised is that it was a back door to exploitation.
Trans rights seems to sit somewhere in the middle - people are happy in accepting that people can say who they are, where they push back is when it is seen to be a situation open to potential abuse (people who identify as women using women's facilities) and / or children being allowed, or even encouraged, to take life changing decisions at an early age. There is also the matter that it is an active case of the state / medical profession treating the child as "communal property" rather than someone's child.
It's also worth remembering that a lot of the one dose people might well have gotten their jabs in the previous two or three weeks, in which case you wouldn't expect that much protection from the jab.
It is likely that there will be some watering down of 'Freedom Day' even on the current trends so far, likely some relaxations eg increases in capacity in pubs and restaurants will be allowed 21 June, but still with masks when entering and moving around. Masks in shops and on public transport.
I suspect people can live with wearing masks on the Tube for a few more weeks, and when pottering around Sainsbury's. However, I favour a complete unlocking now – just get everyone jabbed. Get it done.
In other areas eg London the increase is much slower - Hancock etc will be hoping that we don't see an acceleration as we have seen in NW. It might happen.
Let's start at Goodison. Run on to some Taylor Swift and then that.
BLM and racism.
The problem (in the US) is this:
(1) BLM is a pretty unpleasant organisation with many goals that are (frankly) unpleasant and antidemocratic
(2) There is still a lot of genuine racism in the US, particularly (but not exclusively) in the Southern States and particularly from law enforcement officers
There is a lot of the (justified) criticism of BLM. But the problem is that the people criticising BLM appear to be condoning (2). This therefore creates this false dichotomy: if you don't support BLM you are condoning racism.
The perception is heightened by the fact that a lot of people criticising BLM are so obsessed with it, that they don't seem to ever mention the real issues with racism in the US.
What there needs to be is an organisation that is genuinely seen as opposing racism, and supporting institutional change, that isn't saddled with the baggage of BLM.
Unfortunately (like with so many things) we've ended up incredibly polarised right now.
What a fucking palaver.
No wonder Lilibet is staying at home.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-57379875
1. The anti-racism; and
2. The crap.
Our football players have imported 1 and I'm sure have no clue (along with many in the UK and on PB and so what if they do it's a US thing) about 2.
In the 1990s I read the Joseph Wambaugh book ' the Blooding', about the infancy of criminal DNA testing and Colin Pitchfork in particular. Wambaugh paints a picture of what Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann were like before they crossed Pitchfork's path.
The parole board has decided that Colin Pitchfork can walk free. Just an observation: but the teenage girls he raped and murdered, Dawn Ashworth and Lynda Mann can't walk free. Why does 'life' for heinous rapes and murders not mean 'life'. I am not on the Priti Patel side of the justice fence, but one has to agree in this case maybe she has a point.
If I hold up two fingers to you what I mean by it is very different dependent on which way round I hold my hand.
trans. No one has resigned, no one has been disciplined, no one has been sacked, and the tax payer will be paying your damages
Letter of apology sent from Lord Advocate to former #Rangers chief exec Charles Green and former director, Imran Ahmad. Both men now seeking millions in compensation.
https://twitter.com/BBCchrismclaug/status/1401910547696730112?s=20
What narrow-minded people like you struggle to understand is that 85%+ of the population (and, yes, it should be 100%) support racial equality but only a minority support extreme solutions that involve disrespect to their culture and history, and judging people by racial group.
"Peru, presidential election result:
92.6% counted
Castillo (PL, left): 50.08% (+0.09)
Fujimori (FP, right): 49.92% (-0.09)
(+/- vs. 92.1% counted)"
https://twitter.com/AmericaElige/status/1401939746423726080
Apart from THE KNEE how could you possibly object. If you are saying that the UK is not racist then fair enough but you are saying up to 10m people in this country are or could be racist.
It's not *quite* complete freedom. And if you're not vaccinated, you're supposed to still wear a mask (yeah right).
But the core is that all capacity restrictions go, and everything is allowed to open.
There are two remaining restrictions:
1. At very large indoor events (more than 10,000 people) - i.e. basketball games - you are required to either be vaccinated or to have had a negative Covid test in the previous 72 hours.
2. Masks on public transport. (Not that we have much public transport in LA.) Which is, I suspect, a response to the fact that so many bus drivers got Covid here first time around.
The way to deal with black lives matter is for everyone to say it, so that the phrase becomes background noise that only racists object to. Its an inoffensive phrase and nobody seriously hears that and thinks "Marxism". If you or I say black lives matter then who is going to think that means abolishing capitalism?
Tom Newton Dunn
@tnewtondunn
·
2m
Deputy Speaker Nigel Evans grants Mitchell's request for an emergency SO24 debate tomorrow on ODA, to last for three hours.
The rise of aggressive identity politics is threatening progress in my opinion. Eventually all ethnic groups including "white" will be provoked into a divisive and sectarian outlook that will undermine social cohesion and willingness to make sacrifices to improve the lot of others.
Many of the so-called left (pseudo left, really) are participants in politics as a recreational sport aiming to defeat the opposition above all else. They are guilty of "overshoot". They need the struggle to continue a bit like ASH on smoking. Temporary and transient unequal outcomes are seized upon as proof that society is racist and this must be eliminated by impractical and self-defeating measures. We are within the grasp of evolving into a relaxed multi-racial society and these narcissistic zealots will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Very flat - slightly up yes, but not big increase.
Having said that if the government undertook to make up the "shortfall" by donating vaccines of a value of 0.2% of GDP or frankly even more I would very much welcome this. We are going to be drowning in vaccines by the Autumn even at our currently disappointing rate of distribution and we are already committed to pay for them.
https://twitter.com/BMG_Bund/status/1401940127354662916
PS Camden is an absolute dump, I have no idea why anyone would want to live there.
It’s heaving with Spanish goths, third generation Amy Winehouse impersonators, and the dessicated remains of Alan Bennett.
Not that it affects the reasons why lifting lockdown is appropriate.
It is strange behaviour, not sure what the solution is.
Florida Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez are somewhat lonely voices as their party takes an increasingly hard line on the border.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/07/republicans-immigration-congress-491619
. . . . Florida Reps. María Elvira Salazar and Carlos Giménez are somewhat lonely voices in the GOP, in part because the migration influx soon after President Joe Biden took office gave Republicans an opening to paint Democrats as soft on the border. But Salazar and Giménez are promoting separate frameworks to overhaul the nation's flawed immigration system that could help their party build on the surprising inroads former President Donald Trump made with Latino voters last fall.
Both of them toppled Democratic incumbents on their way to winning last fall. And both freshmen want to see Republicans embrace a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently residing in the U.S. — albeit paths that are harder to walk than Biden and Democrats would want.
Their work to win more GOP buy-in for a comprehensive immigration plan is made more complicated, however, by the party's attraction to blunt-force messaging on border security as the Biden administration grapples with the issue.
“The problem with the border is, it's an urgency that has overshadowed the importance of us giving some type of dignity or some type of resolution to those people who have been here for more than 10 years,” Salazar said in an interview. “We're talking about 11 million people that are waiting for an answer.”
. . . . "I am a brown girl from the ‘hood, who is a Republican, who is coming to tell my party that it’s time to wake up and smell the votes," she said in February after challenging ultra-conservative Trump adviser Stephen Miller on the matter during a closed-door meeting.
. . . . Giménez, a former Miami-Dade mayor, has offered a less sweeping overhaul that would still represent a huge step forward for the post-Trump GOP. His proposal would allow undocumented immigrants already working in the U.S. to pursue a pathway to citizenship by applying through their country of origin, without having to return to their countries to do so. Gimenez's plan would effectively sweep them into the current system without putting them ahead of anyone else seeking legal immigration status.
“To me that's a much simpler way," Giménez said in an interview. "Different countries have different quotas. Some people may make it to citizenship and some people may not, but I'll tell you what — I think that most of the undocumented immigrants here, all they want to do is go out in the light."
“There's a practical impossibility to deporting them,” he added. “They're a productive part of our society for the most part." . . . .
It's a Monday - so waiting on a oat of hospital admission and other data. Tuesday is the day, as ever.
One thing though.
Cases are rising in the 15-44 group. Indeed, nearly all of the rise is happening there.
0-14 is basically flat. The narrative that there are large amount of school based infections seems improbable - unless there is a massive differential in the 15-18 age group.
Just as there's about 25% (if that) of the country that see the country's flag and think its extremists or fascists etc behind the flag.
Ignore the weirdos who take offence because they want to and move on.
https://www.gov.uk/alerts
If not, they are dumb as rocks.
As well as the Wambaugh book mentioned, the television drama Code of a Killer about the case and the development of DNA profiling is probably available on various streaming platforms. It is curious that Alec Jeffreys did not win a Nobel Prize, though Kary Mulis did for inventing the PCR technique used in DNA profiling and, of course, Covid testing.
I am on my way home from Bradford after having received my second dose of AZ. A Class 333 if anyone is interested.
I even had time to pop in to Greggs before my appointment.
Sweet.
I understand the risks and if I'm going to go to a large public gathering I know them even more. I wouldn't sue anyone if I went voluntarily and wound up with Covid which is and will continue to be a small but non-zero risk.
Not holding my breath, though.
Got pretty good money for select few, not bad return for lots more, pretty much a pittance for many - and was able to dump the rest at a place gave what they didn't want to a worthy charity.
However, that was before the internet - NOT thrift stores - hollowed out the used book shops thus greatly reducing their number in Seattle and other places (not sure about London).
Have bought books at Skoobs.
One key thing that Leon mentioned re: his stash, it that he would like someone to come a get them, which does change the equation. When I did my great cull-out, did have some book buyers come and make offers on what they fancied. But in the end flogged & schlepped most of them myself. Including borrowing a big panel van to haul the final load to the "we take everything but pay little if anything" place.
Now those getting COVID today might be younger and will be more likely to be vaccinated than those getting COVID over the past month... so that's probably a worst case scenario... but we could still see some big rises in hospitalizations I think.
I've been getting some texts like that for the last couple of years, not very often but about once every 4-6 months I'll get a text out of the blue about the local A&E etc
No idea where they got my number from to do so. Maybe from the GP?
I'd rather spend an afternoon's racing at Lingfield to be honest.
BBC News - Lockdown: Social distancing could remain in Wales to end of 2021
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-57346925
In reality, Philip is just projecting what he wishes the reality to be. Sky and the PL started this whole thing as being about black lives matter but have then tried to turn it into something broader. Sky could have dropped the BLM branding, but they won’t. If they want to disassociate it with the political organisation, then I’d suggest they should explicitly state that they do not approve of BLM’s politics.
I see the impending arrival of GB News has got the age-old debate about partiality going.
I'm curious as to what this notion of "balanced" news coverage looks like. I always thought in a democracy the Government of the day should be subject to scrutiny, to account - questions should be asked and answers given and those answers should be challenged if they are evasive or irrelevant.
Are we suggesting Government should not be held to account?
The balance comes by holding the Opposition to account as well, not for what they have done because they aren't in power but about what they would do. It's perfectly reasonable, it seems to this observer, to both challenge the Government about what it has done, is doing and will do and challenge the Opposition on what they would do.
I don't see why either Government or Opposition should be allowed a "free pass" and if journalistic scrutiny is annoying both sides, it's probably doing a good job.
Naturally the Government will face the greater scrutiny because they are the ones in power - they have a record to defend and to which they should be held to account.
(3) A statement under subsection (1) or (2) must explain why the 0.7% target has not been met in the report year and, if relevant, refer to the effect of one or more of the following—
(a) economic circumstances and, in particular, any substantial change in gross national income;
(b) fiscal circumstances and, in particular, the likely impact of meeting the target on taxation, public spending and public borrowing;
(c) circumstances arising outside the United Kingdom.
(4) A statement under subsection (1) must also describe any steps that the Secretary of State has taken to ensure that the 0.7% target will be met by the United Kingdom in the calendar year following the report year.
As the Sol Gen pointed out this morning it is therefore not technically true to say that it would be "illegal" to cut the aid budget because the Act imposing the target already allows for such a possibility. I don't think knocking up a statement covering points (a), (b) and (c) would be too tricky.
Yes case numbers are rising, amongst people who aren't likely to end up in hospital. However vaccination rates are going up too.
There's currently about 6k cases per day and over 600k vaccinations per day. For every single case there's a hundred vaccinations happening. While cases are going up, the numbers of people who are unvaccinated are going down faster than cases are going up.