Hospital admissions for covid even if at a 1000 a day equate to less than 2 per parliamentary constituency . FFS if the NHS cannot cope with that i am not sure it is worth any support . Get a grip politicians and keep to the 21st
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?
It's a fair point: how many Americans who put money in the hat "for the boys back home" knew that the IRA was an explicitly Marxist organisation devoted to the overthrow of capitalism?
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
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.
A fair point - so let's have specific proposals and get them debated and piloted.
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.
Although it is worth remembering that the places which saw the earliest Delta rises (like Bedford and Bradford) have seen numbers in hospital peak and decline.
So, while we might well see a rise, the evidence so far is that it is only a temporary spike.
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.
Vaccinations continue apace. The spread from the disease foci, even under current circumstances, is gradual. Delta is not going to cause an explosion in hospital admissions.
We know from Dr Pagel writing in the Graun today that even the ISAGE zealots have given up on immediate massacre by Delta, and are preparing the next line of defence: that the vaccines work now, but protection will vanish by the Autumn and the massacre will happen then instead. They intend to declare "told you so" in October rather than July. In the meantime, we must have lockdown, lockdown and more lockdown, etc., etc.
If we simply keep accepting these prophesies of doom, then we might as well all lock ourselves up in our houses and sit there pissing ourselves in terror until those of us who haven't topped ourselves through depression finally perish of old age. Enough.
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.
Sorry but nobody but professional offence takers have a clue about "BLM's politics" other than "racism is bad".
People talk about how there's a "Black Lives Matter Party" and therefore the term is political, but people care about the Tory Party, the Labour Party, the SNP and maybe a few people care about also-rans like the Lib Dems or the Greens. The people who in all sincerity think about a BLM Party is <0.001% of the electorate.
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?
Unless we see a serious rise in cases in the 40s and above groups, then hospitalisations wouldn't rise much. Even without vaccinations.
As an aside, looking at the EU vaccine tracker, I see that France has passed 50% of adults with at least one dose - and is running well ahead of the EU averages for take up.
It's funny how anecdote and data are often very different.
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
The whole point of it is the drinking, dressing and partying. The racing provides an excellent backdrop to having a laugh.
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.
Secondly, I'm saying the opposite of what you imply. It's a big fucking problem and no one wants to talk about it. In a few years time it will be as big a scandal as the Rotherham and other grooming cases. Young black teenagers are being coerced with cash and drugs to join gangs and take part in violent acts against rival gangs. It's one of the most lamentable parts of modern inner city culture.
Nobody is disagreeing with you though. It isn't an either/or.
The point is the chances of a black man getting kiiled by a policeman in the UK are incredibly small. The chances of a black man getting killed by a black man are infinitely higher, its a daily event. Yet the whole BLM is about police killing black men even though it is rarer than a day without a Scott retweet on this site. There is nothing about black men killing black men.
So? It appears you literally have no idea what the BLM movement is all about.
Cops kill black people disproportionately in the USA. Taking the knee is a response to that. It literally doesn't matter if the British police don't do that, it is completely irrelevant.
Maybe you should educate yourself rather than just irrationally and blindly being against something you don't understand.
We live in the UK. The biggest crime problem here is black men killing black men. Are our footballers taking the knee to complain about the actions of the American Police? We cannot do anything about the American Police as we cant do anything about the dozens of murderous regimes that exist in the world. Would it not be better if our footballers were trying to raise the awareness of something that is happening daily in the UK, leading the pointless deaths of hundreds of black kids each year?
Marcus Rashford, for example, literally led a campaign to feed hungry British children in addition to the BLM protest and he was criticised for that by the same people who hate BLM.
If footballers want to take the knee, who cares? Our culture is interlinked with the US and has been for a long time. Nobody is saying you have to partake.
If you think they should focus on other issues too, I would agree with you. But in terms of being role models, being against cops killing black people in the USA is pretty inoffensive.
The trouble is that "taking the knee" has got to a point where it REALLY antagonising fans. And I don't think the objections are "from racists", it's because fans see sport as a politics-free holiday away from everyday life. Especially football.
They come to football to escape the sad, fractured, humdrum world, to flee the austerities and violence of reality, to be part of a happy tribe, to see some people do something pointless - but brilliantly. To savour the highs and lows of combat, but in a safe allegorical way.
And now, when they go to a football match, they get multi-millionaires lecturing them about their racism, in a symbolic gesture that holds up the match. No wonder they boo
It was fine for a few weeks last summer, emotions were high. They really should stop doing it now. It is going to blight the euro championship, a virtue signalling equivalent of the vuvuzelas in the Saffer World Cup
No, it antagonises some very sensitive snowflakes. The rest of us either simply do something else whilst they do it, or actively clap.
Like I said, football fans are free to boo, and we're free to call them the dickheads that they are.
No, it antagonises the majority of people who don't think sport and politics should mix.
The biggest issue is that it is British sport and USA politics.
Was apartheid merely South African politics?
Surely the parallel would be excluding the USA from international sporting competitions until they stop killing black people. Or something.
There is no comparison between Massachussetts, New York and California and apartheid South Africa and never really has been, you might be able to make a comparison between attitudes of whites in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi and those of whites in South Africa even today
Plenty of sundowner towns in Massachussetts between the late C19th and mid C20th. It might have been a nicer apartheid, but it was still white people making sure that black people got the short end of the stick.
No different to many attitudes in the UK 100 to 150 years ago.
However there were no laws enforcing racial segregation in Massachussetts or the UK as such as there were in the southern US states until the mid 1960s and in South Africa until the early 1990s
That depends on your definition of law. There were restrictive zoning codes and neighborhood covenants in many northern US cities which had the same effect as South Africa's hated Pass Laws. And other forms of official discrimination like new freeways which always, mysteriously, seemed to be driven through poor black areas while leaving nearby white ones untouched.
Blacks were also frequently turned away from hotels in the UK too at that time, eg the Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constatantine was turned away from the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square as late as 1943, plus of course the frequent 'no blacks, no Irish' signs in boarding houses, largely whites only suburbs and the revelation that even in the 1960s there were no black clerical staff working for the royal household.
However again it was largely informal segregation rather than state sanctioned segregation prescribed by state law as in the southern US and South Africa
Also worth looking at the accounts of the way in which the British public welcomed the black servicemen in spite of the anger of the racist element of the US army.
At Bamber Bridge in Lancashire when the local US commanders insisted on racial segregation in the village, all three local pubs posted 'Black Troops Only' signs.
I read a recent account of work on a UK carrier in the US in WW2 (it *may* have been the conversion of HMS Victorious to be USS Robin) where black workmen turned up to work on the carrier escorted by armed white security men to control them.
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.
Although it is worth remembering that the places which saw the earliest Delta rises (like Bedford and Bradford) have seen numbers in hospital peak and decline.
So, while we might well see a rise, the evidence so far is that it is only a temporary spike.
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
Still enough to cause a lot of hospitalisations, even if considerably fewer deaths.
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
The whole point of it is the drinking, dressing and partying. The racing provides an excellent backdrop to having a laugh.
As we often say at race meetings - oh look, a horse.
It's a fair point: how many Americans who put money in the hat "for the boys back home" knew that the IRA was an explicitly Marxist organisation devoted to the overthrow of capitalism?
Colin Parry, whose son Tim was murdered in the Warrington bombing along with Johnathan Ball, did a documentary many years ago where he went to the US to speak to people from NORAID. Their ignorance of essentially everything was stupefying, they really had no knowledge of the history of Ireland, what modern Ireland was like, what was happening in Northern Ireland, or what they were funding and who that funding killed. They genuinely appeared to not have heard of the bombing that killed Parry's son. They were ignorant bigots to a person.
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.
Oxfam have the biggest secondhand bookshop chain in the country - 100 shops. Plus sections in the other 650 shops.
Free stock, largely free volunteer staff, 80% off business rates, and pay no Corporation Tax on the profits.
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.
I believe the number that supported taking the knee was about the same as those that dont. By insuation you are calling all those that object racist which is also about 10 million. The problem I have with the taking the knee issue is 1) its about a problem in a foreign country, 2) It implies those that think its twaddle are part of the problem. The knee takers seem to believe now its not enough to not be a racist but now you actually have to be anti racist...there language not mine...those people can fuck off
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
The whole point of it is the drinking, dressing and partying. The racing provides an excellent backdrop to having a laugh.
Not for me - it's five days of the best horse racing of the year. It's superior to Cheltenham in almost every respect albeit it's been diluted by adding some pointless handicaps on to the end of each day's card.
It's having a bet, watching some world-class racing and seeing some present and future champions - the rest of it is irrelevant.
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
45 -> 64 looks to have doubled?
374 to 539 actually.
Another way to look at this. Over the period of the chart, cases increased by 2241 (7 day average)
The proportion of the increase in cases represented by each group is
9.05% 0 to 14 76.66% 15 to 44 12.78% 45 to 64 1.02% 65 to 74 0.42% 75 to 84 0.06% 85+
Even allowing for the different sizes of the groups, it is quite clear where the issue is.
The following is the cases for each age group, with each age group scaled to "out of 100K"
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.
I believe the number that supported taking the knee was about the same as those that dont. By insuation you are calling all those that object racist which is also about 10 million. The problem I have with the taking the knee issue is 1) its about a problem in a foreign country, 2) It implies those that think its twaddle are part of the problem. The knee takers seem to believe now its not enough to not be a racist but now you actually have to be anti racist...there language not mine...those people can fuck off
Nah you're over thinking it.
It's about some footballers saying racism is bad. That's all. If you think it's twaddle then good for you. I would wonder why on earth but not think that makes you a racist.
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
The whole point of it is the drinking, dressing and partying. The racing provides an excellent backdrop to having a laugh.
Not for me - it's five days of the best horse racing of the year. It's superior to Cheltenham in almost every respect albeit it's been diluted by adding some pointless handicaps on to the end of each day's card.
It's having a bet, watching some world-class racing and seeing some present and future champions - the rest of it is irrelevant.
Bah humbug. I imagine you as the grumpy get fingering the Racing Post while tutting at the gaiety and the jollity around you.
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.
I'm not very keen on newspapers setting themselves up as challengers to either side - I don't especially want to know what the Guardian editor or the Mail editor think, but rather a clear overview of the pros and cons of each issue, with some quotes from interested groups on both sides, so we can all make up our own minds. Newspaper campaigns for this or that issue have a self-serving streak ("Look at the Evening Standard fighting the good fight!"), and if that infiltrates their coverage of the facts (as it does for most of the press) then it's downright detrimental even if we agree with them.
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
Still enough to cause a lot of hospitalisations, even if considerably fewer deaths.
Depending which end of the 15-44 group we are looking at. It's annoying that they don't segment the data in 5 year intervals.....
The admissions is even more annoying - 18-64... I ask you.... We need to wait for data until tomorrow, but again, the trend is clear.
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)
I don't actually know what the point is if it's not about the racing. If you want to meet friends for lunch, you don't have to dress up and go all the way to Berkshire and in any case there can only be six from you from two households so it's not really a "party".
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
The whole point of it is the drinking, dressing and partying. The racing provides an excellent backdrop to having a laugh.
Not for me - it's five days of the best horse racing of the year. It's superior to Cheltenham in almost every respect albeit it's been diluted by adding some pointless handicaps on to the end of each day's card.
It's having a bet, watching some world-class racing and seeing some present and future champions - the rest of it is irrelevant.
Whether racing is about the actual races or the drinking, dressing and partying is one of those eternal debates, like asking whether Christmas is about the baby Jesus or Father Christmas and presents.
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
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
Still enough to cause a lot of hospitalisations, even if considerably fewer deaths.
The evidence available now suggests that there won't be "a lot" of additional hospitalisations, by any reasonable definition of the term.
Fundamentally, the one and only justification for restrictions is "without them, the healthcare system will collapse." It's not to help the NHS catch up faster with its backlog, or to pursue a Zero Covid strategy, or anything else. If the healthcare system will survive the removal of mask mandates and social distancing then they should go, and that's the end of that.
In point of fact, I suspect the most likely outcome on June 21st is that social distancing is binned but we end up stuck with the stupid masks til God knows when (which wouldn't be so bad if it just applied in limited cases like getting on a train, but we may still be lumbered with them whenever we set foot inside a building that isn't our own house.) If that's the case then we're going to have to be very, very careful that they don't become permanent. It's as clear as day that, if we're still stuck with them come about September, the flu suppression excuse will then be deployed and we may never be rid of the wretched things.
Bah humbug. I imagine you as the grumpy get fingering the Racing Post while tutting at the gaiety and the jollity around you.
Yep, that's me and that's why I prefer a midweek afternoon at Lingfield, Sandown or Plumpton with people who have come to enjoy the sport not have a pub lunch.
I'd quite happily enjoy a good meal and a drink at a football or rugby match - anything to avoid the mind-numbing tedium of having to watch the game (if you can call it that).
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?
Sigh. We've been here so many times before - it's boring.
"Taking a knee" is disliked because it's seen as the thin end of a wedge that ends with iconoclasm and concepts like "white privilege". Indeed, sometimes those concepts are directly linked.
I'm afraid BLM as a movement is heavily politicised, and people do correlate the two.
This is why I talk about the importance of racial equality instead and focussing on addressing the real concerns black people have.
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.
I believe the number that supported taking the knee was about the same as those that dont. By insuation you are calling all those that object racist which is also about 10 million. The problem I have with the taking the knee issue is 1) its about a problem in a foreign country, 2) It implies those that think its twaddle are part of the problem. The knee takers seem to believe now its not enough to not be a racist but now you actually have to be anti racist...there language not mine...those people can fuck off
Nah you're over thinking it.
It's about some footballers saying racism is bad. That's all. If you think it's twaddle then good for you. I would wonder why on earth but not think that makes you a racist.
It is twaddle because it doesnt happen here, the problems of the black community here are entirely different and they would be better off calling attention to those. That is why I think its unmitigated twaddle
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
The reality is that humans are far from perfect at that as our sub-conscious relies very heavily on pattern recognition. If everyone gave skin colour no conscious thought, we would still end up with a racist world from the way our sub conscious minds are wired.
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.
No, there are several challenges. There are the overt racists - happily, in a declining minority - and then there are the subtle preconceptions black people can still face in wider society which disadvantage them, then there those who are seeking to exploit this for their own ends, and then there are idiots who go along with that.
Unlike you, I don't see any problem in addressing all strands, nor looking for solutions that unite people rather than divide them - and I note you enthusiastically endorsed "the boot being on the other foot" earlier in the thread so I will take precisely no lectures from you.
Secondly, I'm saying the opposite of what you imply. It's a big fucking problem and no one wants to talk about it. In a few years time it will be as big a scandal as the Rotherham and other grooming cases. Young black teenagers are being coerced with cash and drugs to join gangs and take part in violent acts against rival gangs. It's one of the most lamentable parts of modern inner city culture.
Nobody is disagreeing with you though. It isn't an either/or.
The point is the chances of a black man getting kiiled by a policeman in the UK are incredibly small. The chances of a black man getting killed by a black man are infinitely higher, its a daily event. Yet the whole BLM is about police killing black men even though it is rarer than a day without a Scott retweet on this site. There is nothing about black men killing black men.
So? It appears you literally have no idea what the BLM movement is all about.
Cops kill black people disproportionately in the USA. Taking the knee is a response to that. It literally doesn't matter if the British police don't do that, it is completely irrelevant.
Maybe you should educate yourself rather than just irrationally and blindly being against something you don't understand.
We live in the UK. The biggest crime problem here is black men killing black men. Are our footballers taking the knee to complain about the actions of the American Police? We cannot do anything about the American Police as we cant do anything about the dozens of murderous regimes that exist in the world. Would it not be better if our footballers were trying to raise the awareness of something that is happening daily in the UK, leading the pointless deaths of hundreds of black kids each year?
Marcus Rashford, for example, literally led a campaign to feed hungry British children in addition to the BLM protest and he was criticised for that by the same people who hate BLM.
If footballers want to take the knee, who cares? Our culture is interlinked with the US and has been for a long time. Nobody is saying you have to partake.
If you think they should focus on other issues too, I would agree with you. But in terms of being role models, being against cops killing black people in the USA is pretty inoffensive.
The trouble is that "taking the knee" has got to a point where it REALLY antagonising fans. And I don't think the objections are "from racists", it's because fans see sport as a politics-free holiday away from everyday life. Especially football.
They come to football to escape the sad, fractured, humdrum world, to flee the austerities and violence of reality, to be part of a happy tribe, to see some people do something pointless - but brilliantly. To savour the highs and lows of combat, but in a safe allegorical way.
And now, when they go to a football match, they get multi-millionaires lecturing them about their racism, in a symbolic gesture that holds up the match. No wonder they boo
It was fine for a few weeks last summer, emotions were high. They really should stop doing it now. It is going to blight the euro championship, a virtue signalling equivalent of the vuvuzelas in the Saffer World Cup
No, it antagonises some very sensitive snowflakes. The rest of us either simply do something else whilst they do it, or actively clap.
Like I said, football fans are free to boo, and we're free to call them the dickheads that they are.
No, it antagonises the majority of people who don't think sport and politics should mix.
The biggest issue is that it is British sport and USA politics.
Was apartheid merely South African politics?
Surely the parallel would be excluding the USA from international sporting competitions until they stop killing black people. Or something.
There is no comparison between Massachussetts, New York and California and apartheid South Africa and never really has been, you might be able to make a comparison between attitudes of whites in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi and those of whites in South Africa even today
Plenty of sundowner towns in Massachussetts between the late C19th and mid C20th. It might have been a nicer apartheid, but it was still white people making sure that black people got the short end of the stick.
No different to many attitudes in the UK 100 to 150 years ago.
However there were no laws enforcing racial segregation in Massachussetts or the UK as such as there were in the southern US states until the mid 1960s and in South Africa until the early 1990s
That depends on your definition of law. There were restrictive zoning codes and neighborhood covenants in many northern US cities which had the same effect as South Africa's hated Pass Laws. And other forms of official discrimination like new freeways which always, mysteriously, seemed to be driven through poor black areas while leaving nearby white ones untouched.
Blacks were also frequently turned away from hotels in the UK too at that time, eg the Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constatantine was turned away from the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square as late as 1943, plus of course the frequent 'no blacks, no Irish' signs in boarding houses, largely whites only suburbs and the revelation that even in the 1960s there were no black clerical staff working for the royal household.
However again it was largely informal segregation rather than state sanctioned segregation prescribed by state law as in the southern US and South Africa
Also worth looking at the accounts of the way in which the British public welcomed the black servicemen in spite of the anger of the racist element of the US army.
At Bamber Bridge in Lancashire when the local US commanders insisted on racial segregation in the village, all three local pubs posted 'Black Troops Only' signs.
I read a recent account of work on a UK carrier in the US in WW2 (it *may* have been the conversion of HMS Victorious to be USS Robin) where black workmen turned up to work on the carrier escorted by armed white security men to control them.
Security sent packing after an altercation.
It was, when I looked it up - sounded like an interesting story.
I remember my father who was in Plymouth with the Royal Navy for much of the war. Two US MPs or SPs (white) shot a black GI/sailor on the spot (I forget which) one evening for the crime of being a little tipsy and obstreperous. He still remembered the reaction of the RN crews to that incident.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases 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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I'm not very keen on newspapers setting themselves up as challengers to either side - I don't especially want to know what the Guardian editor or the Mail editor think, but rather a clear overview of the pros and cons of each issue, with some quotes from interested groups on both sides, so we can all make up our own minds. Newspaper campaigns for this or that issue have a self-serving streak ("Look at the Evening Standard fighting the good fight!"), and if that infiltrates their coverage of the facts (as it does for most of the press) then it's downright detrimental even if we agree with them.
I must confess, Nick, I was thinking more of television news and especially the "rolling news" channels to which GB News will shortly be added.
I've given up any hope of "balance" from the newspapers but at least we all know where they stand. That's not to say there aren't occasionally incisive and thought-provoking pieces but I find them a rarity among a whole lot of partisan piffle. That's probably why I read the Racing Post though the journalism on that paper is a shadow of what the old Sporting Life used to be.
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Or perhaps this? "The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
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
Still enough to cause a lot of hospitalisations, even if considerably fewer deaths.
The evidence available now suggests that there won't be "a lot" of additional hospitalisations, by any reasonable definition of the term.
Fundamentally, the one and only justification for restrictions is "without them, the healthcare system will collapse." It's not to help the NHS catch up faster with its backlog, or to pursue a Zero Covid strategy, or anything else. If the healthcare system will survive the removal of mask mandates and social distancing then they should go, and that's the end of that.
In point of fact, I suspect the most likely outcome on June 21st is that social distancing is binned but we end up stuck with the stupid masks til God knows when (which wouldn't be so bad if it just applied in limited cases like getting on a train, but we may still be lumbered with them whenever we set foot inside a building that isn't our own house.) If that's the case then we're going to have to be very, very careful that they don't become permanent. It's as clear as day that, if we're still stuck with them come about September, the flu suppression excuse will then be deployed and we may never be rid of the wretched things.
At some point FOMO kicks in. As the US bins them we will eventually follow. But later,
Nonsense. The BLM website laid out their policies in black and white, their leader called herself a "trained Marxist" and this was widely trailed on the news. Just look at the cut-through phrases like "white privilege" have had through to the electorate in opinion polls too. The trouble was that a number of their activists also acted on these, most widely in the US but also here too with their desire to remove statues and see CRT extending into major institutions.
I agree that the issue should become apolitical but it's going in precisely the wrong direction at present.
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Or perhaps this? "The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
And in the last 3 decades people of colour and gender and disabilty have won some of the highest offices in the land, home secretary...chancellor, mayor of london....how much redistribution do you want
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Or perhaps this? "The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
And in the last 3 decades people of colour and gender and disabilty have won some of the highest offices in the land, home secretary...chancellor, mayor of london....how much redistribution do you want
Don't disagree. However, to argue that MLK (who at 92 could easily have still been around), would have opposed BLM is for the birds.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
Nonsense. The BLM website laid out their policies in black and white, their leader called herself a "trained Marxist" and this was widely trailed on the news. Just look at the cut-through phrases like "white privilege" have had through to the electorate in opinion polls too. The trouble was that a number of their activists also acted on these, most widely in the US but also here too with their desire to remove statues and see CRT extending into major institutions.
I agree that the issue should become apolitical but it's going in precisely the wrong direction at present.
Who gives a f**k about the BLM website? How many millions of people do you think have read and memorised the BLM website as opposed to just hearing a message against racism?
I think with respect you spend an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter listening to phrases like "white privilege". I don't think I've ever heard that phrase uttered in real life. Nor "CRT" either. 🤷♂️
There was a grand total of one (1) statue I can think of removed in protests a year ago, you were saying then it was the thin end of the wedge but it was one slaver and then it stopped.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
Its been offered to people. If they've refused it then the vaccine rollout is done there too.
If they want to be acquire antibodies the hard way then that's their choice, there's nothing more to be done about it.
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
Still enough to cause a lot of hospitalisations, even if considerably fewer deaths.
The evidence available now suggests that there won't be "a lot" of additional hospitalisations, by any reasonable definition of the term.
Fundamentally, the one and only justification for restrictions is "without them, the healthcare system will collapse." It's not to help the NHS catch up faster with its backlog, or to pursue a Zero Covid strategy, or anything else. If the healthcare system will survive the removal of mask mandates and social distancing then they should go, and that's the end of that.
In point of fact, I suspect the most likely outcome on June 21st is that social distancing is binned but we end up stuck with the stupid masks til God knows when (which wouldn't be so bad if it just applied in limited cases like getting on a train, but we may still be lumbered with them whenever we set foot inside a building that isn't our own house.) If that's the case then we're going to have to be very, very careful that they don't become permanent. It's as clear as day that, if we're still stuck with them come about September, the flu suppression excuse will then be deployed and we may never be rid of the wretched things.
At some point FOMO kicks in. As the US bins them we will eventually follow. But later,
From my experience today there are a significant number of the elderly continuing to wear them outside. They vote and you know who they vote for.
One of the interesting questions is going to be how willing the BCE will be to split to wards (it is unavoidable in Scotland and probably not required in Wales/NI)
It is a question of whether to prioritise not splitting wards over minimising local authority crossing. For example, the BCE can have a single Bromley-Croydon crossing with a split ward or 2 crossings with no split ward
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Further to this its worth noting that if the vaccinations continue at the same pace as they did over the past month, no increase, then by this time next month that would see an over 45% reduction in unvaccinated adults and nearly 44% reduction in adults without two doses.
Quite simply the virus is running out of people to hospitalise faster than people are getting infected.
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.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
Perhaps they should put themselves out then? Unless you’re suggesting that there’s a conspiracy.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
What is stopping them being vaccinated??
Stupidity.
No, every time they try and get a vaccination, a hypersonic UFO gets in the way....
Secondly, I'm saying the opposite of what you imply. It's a big fucking problem and no one wants to talk about it. In a few years time it will be as big a scandal as the Rotherham and other grooming cases. Young black teenagers are being coerced with cash and drugs to join gangs and take part in violent acts against rival gangs. It's one of the most lamentable parts of modern inner city culture.
Nobody is disagreeing with you though. It isn't an either/or.
The point is the chances of a black man getting kiiled by a policeman in the UK are incredibly small. The chances of a black man getting killed by a black man are infinitely higher, its a daily event. Yet the whole BLM is about police killing black men even though it is rarer than a day without a Scott retweet on this site. There is nothing about black men killing black men.
So? It appears you literally have no idea what the BLM movement is all about.
Cops kill black people disproportionately in the USA. Taking the knee is a response to that. It literally doesn't matter if the British police don't do that, it is completely irrelevant.
Maybe you should educate yourself rather than just irrationally and blindly being against something you don't understand.
We live in the UK. The biggest crime problem here is black men killing black men. Are our footballers taking the knee to complain about the actions of the American Police? We cannot do anything about the American Police as we cant do anything about the dozens of murderous regimes that exist in the world. Would it not be better if our footballers were trying to raise the awareness of something that is happening daily in the UK, leading the pointless deaths of hundreds of black kids each year?
Marcus Rashford, for example, literally led a campaign to feed hungry British children in addition to the BLM protest and he was criticised for that by the same people who hate BLM.
If footballers want to take the knee, who cares? Our culture is interlinked with the US and has been for a long time. Nobody is saying you have to partake.
If you think they should focus on other issues too, I would agree with you. But in terms of being role models, being against cops killing black people in the USA is pretty inoffensive.
The trouble is that "taking the knee" has got to a point where it REALLY antagonising fans. And I don't think the objections are "from racists", it's because fans see sport as a politics-free holiday away from everyday life. Especially football.
They come to football to escape the sad, fractured, humdrum world, to flee the austerities and violence of reality, to be part of a happy tribe, to see some people do something pointless - but brilliantly. To savour the highs and lows of combat, but in a safe allegorical way.
And now, when they go to a football match, they get multi-millionaires lecturing them about their racism, in a symbolic gesture that holds up the match. No wonder they boo
It was fine for a few weeks last summer, emotions were high. They really should stop doing it now. It is going to blight the euro championship, a virtue signalling equivalent of the vuvuzelas in the Saffer World Cup
No, it antagonises some very sensitive snowflakes. The rest of us either simply do something else whilst they do it, or actively clap.
Like I said, football fans are free to boo, and we're free to call them the dickheads that they are.
No, it antagonises the majority of people who don't think sport and politics should mix.
The biggest issue is that it is British sport and USA politics.
Was apartheid merely South African politics?
Surely the parallel would be excluding the USA from international sporting competitions until they stop killing black people. Or something.
There is no comparison between Massachussetts, New York and California and apartheid South Africa and never really has been, you might be able to make a comparison between attitudes of whites in South Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi and those of whites in South Africa even today
Plenty of sundowner towns in Massachussetts between the late C19th and mid C20th. It might have been a nicer apartheid, but it was still white people making sure that black people got the short end of the stick.
No different to many attitudes in the UK 100 to 150 years ago.
However there were no laws enforcing racial segregation in Massachussetts or the UK as such as there were in the southern US states until the mid 1960s and in South Africa until the early 1990s
That depends on your definition of law. There were restrictive zoning codes and neighborhood covenants in many northern US cities which had the same effect as South Africa's hated Pass Laws. And other forms of official discrimination like new freeways which always, mysteriously, seemed to be driven through poor black areas while leaving nearby white ones untouched.
Blacks were also frequently turned away from hotels in the UK too at that time, eg the Trinidadian cricketer Learie Constatantine was turned away from the Imperial Hotel, Russell Square as late as 1943, plus of course the frequent 'no blacks, no Irish' signs in boarding houses, largely whites only suburbs and the revelation that even in the 1960s there were no black clerical staff working for the royal household.
As far as I know there's surprisingly little evidence (eg photographic) of those signs. Like - one photograph.
Do we have PBers old enough to have seen them "frequently"?
Suggestion that one of the new SW seats pairs Tiverton and Minehead
Devon is a complex one to fit into the tight quotas. Oxfordshire and Cumbria too.
As far as my part of the world is concerned, I'll be looking to see if they move to three constituencies within Newham - we have East Ham and West Ham and whether there are enough electors to warrant a third constituency I'm uncertain or whether we'll see (as existed before 2010) part of the borough in with another constituency (Poplar and Canning Town as was before that was replaced by Poplar and Limehouse).
We have about 185,000 registered electors in the two constituencies so I don't think there are three there within the current parameters (75,000 electors per constituency).
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
What is stopping them being vaccinated??
Stupidity.
No, every time they try and get a vaccination, a hypersonic UFO gets in the way....
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.
Interesting. This raises an important question about what 'News' is.
Traditionally there are a number of categories of current affairs. There is News, there is Opinion and Comment and there are wider General Interest stories, like where is nice to go for your holidays, what celebs do, back stories about political figures etc.
It seems to me that these have got confused. Recently I spent a few days with BBC Radio 4 being my only source (no internet, no papers, no telly). Focussing on this it became obvious that: actual news (ie what has just occurred of importance) is marginal; that what someone says is prioritised over reportage of actual events; that the BBC hides (not very well) the fact that it has opinions behind how it selects the reporting of the opinions of others.
An overwhelming significance was given to inconvenience to a small number (about 0.1% of the population) of people by changing rules about Portugal.
As to the actual reporting of major events like wars, international politics, and all the stuff we once thought central to 'News' - hardly a thing.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received at least one dose of vaccine have gone from 66.6% to 76.8% That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53% That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
Some significant local variations, Philip.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
What is stopping them being vaccinated??
The secret conspiracy to starve Newham of vaccines even though everyone there really, really wants one...
Have in possession (though not sure where exactly to find it) a sign that I found tucked away in back of a storage cubbyhole, in my old Seattle apartment: "Restricted" in red lettering on white background.
Which was tacked up on the door when the landlord was looking for a tenant, and meaning, restricted to White, non-Jewish people. Which was pretty common practice for many years, in many parts of the US.
Generally the biggest amount of change will be in the south (particularly in London as the groupings will change) but as seats are being added, everyone should get a seat. Some MPs like Alok Sharma may be able to land a safer seat.
I would expect some pitchforks for certain seats:
Buckingham and part of MK - unpopular but unavoidable Part of S Staffs with either some of Dudley or Wolverhampton - again hard to avoid Part of Northumberland with some of Tyne and Wear - unavoidable but I expect everyone will want somewhere else to be the crossover seat
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I can't believe that this country is not racist. The windrush deportations were, to my mind, evidence of outrageous institutional racism - a whole bureaucracy was set up with the apparent unspoken goal of deporting poor black people.
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
Its been offered to people. If they've refused it then the vaccine rollout is done there too.
If they want to be acquire antibodies the hard way then that's their choice, there's nothing more to be done about it.
Every time I mention these numbers, I get a pretty harsh and vitriolic response on here.
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy or anything like that, I'm simply reporting the Government's own numbers whether they are credible or not.
My argument goes like this - any Government has a primary responsibility to protect all its citizens even those who need protecting from themselves. There may be many reasons, as I've mentioned before, why people have not taken the vaccine.
The fact remains however if someone who has not been vaccinated contracts Covid and requires hospital treatment that's resources taken from other parts of the NHS. There is a pool of potentially vulnerable people in my part of the world who, if the Delta or some other variant takes hold, are at risk and that might precipitate a local or indeed London-wide health issue and perhaps the re-introduction of restrictions at least locally.
That's not to gainsay the wider lifting of restrictions but it's a reminder the public health emergency of this may not be over - indeed, I said as far back as last August when we were all out and about enjoying the sun that IF there were a second wave, the public would only have themselves to blame (that wasn't a popular view either).
With the vaccines, I am much more confident but the attitudes of some toward the unvaccinated concern me. My belief is the reasons why so many people in my area have refused the vaccine are far more complex than "stupidity" and stem from deep-seated cultural, religious and other mores which are going to be very hard to overcome.
Nonsense. The BLM website laid out their policies in black and white, their leader called herself a "trained Marxist" and this was widely trailed on the news. Just look at the cut-through phrases like "white privilege" have had through to the electorate in opinion polls too. The trouble was that a number of their activists also acted on these, most widely in the US but also here too with their desire to remove statues and see CRT extending into major institutions.
I agree that the issue should become apolitical but it's going in precisely the wrong direction at present.
Who gives a f**k about the BLM website? How many millions of people do you think have read and memorised the BLM website as opposed to just hearing a message against racism?
I think with respect you spend an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter listening to phrases like "white privilege". I don't think I've ever heard that phrase uttered in real life. Nor "CRT" either. 🤷♂️
There was a grand total of one (1) statue I can think of removed in protests a year ago, you were saying then it was the thin end of the wedge but it was one slaver and then it stopped.
Lots people are aware of it. In fact, almost everyone is. That's why it's so contentious. It was widely reported in the MSM, and some of its leading proponents were very clear that's what it was about. Then, we had the very visceral images of statues coming down, demands for "decolonising" the curriculum, reparations, the withdrawal of television programmes and films, and some of the leading activists - and lots of talking heads - discussing "white privilege" and "white fragility". Hence the 80%+ cut through on the term in the opinion polls.
I spend little time on Twitter. I know about it because my daughter's school, and my workplace, have started preaching about it. It all starts from there.
And you're wrong about statues too. There were hundreds under threat last summer. Removals were arrested by the action of Oliver Dowden and HMG - otherwise many more would have come down - and there are still some more in the pipeline. Three statues were removed with another eighteen under review:
PS. It's hard to respect you when given you 'liked' a post upthread by @OldKingCole insulting me and suggesting I wasn't interested in combatting racism.
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.
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.
Fancy a bet? Donation to pb.com coffers.
Name your terms and I'll consider it.
UK Patients admitted to hospital to be above 200 for 2 or more days in month of June. £20. Based on coronavirus.data.gov
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.
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
That seems to be the Government's response. The footballers are free to take the knee, and the fans to comment
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I can't believe that this country is not racist. The windrush deportations were, to my mind, evidence of outrageous institutional racism - a whole bureaucracy was set up with the apparent unspoken goal of deporting poor black people.
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
Its not a big issue if a few people boo, no. And it would have been better if the players didnt do it every game for lots of months imo.
Whether you like it or not, lots of people in the country want to show their support for a slogan not a fringe political party. As a supposed champion of free speech it really is bizarre you want them to stop simply because you and others are not willing to listen to what they say and instead assume they are showing support for the fringe political party.
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.
A fair comment, however it seems somewhat incongruous that Pitchfork aged 61 can go about his business for another quarter of a century unimpeded, whilst Lynda and Dawn cannot.
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
Its not a big issue if a few people boo, no. And it would have been better if the players didnt do it every game for lots of months imo.
Whether you like it or not, lots of people in the country want to show their support for a slogan not a fringe political party. As a supposed champion of free speech it really is bizarre you want them to stop simply because you and others are not willing to listen to what they say and instead assume they are showing support for the fringe political party.
Woah, hold on. There's a difference between me strongly disagreeing with what someone says or does and wanting to stop them doing it.
Free speech doesn't mean I (or you) have to be sanguine about everything someone else says or does that we disagree with. Sometimes we might disagree vociferously and argue strongly they should do something different instead.
The difference is wanting to exercise influence so they select an alternative choice, not prohibiting them outright for fear of not being able to win the argument.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I can't believe that this country is not racist. The windrush deportations were, to my mind, evidence of outrageous institutional racism - a whole bureaucracy was set up with the apparent unspoken goal of deporting poor black people.
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
Two things can be true at once.
The UK in 2020 can be a lot less racist than it was in, say, 1960, and quite a bit less racist than many other nations now.
The UK in 2020 can still be racist in ways that really need to be sorted here and 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.
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
Its not a big issue if a few people boo, no. And it would have been better if the players didnt do it every game for lots of months imo.
Whether you like it or not, lots of people in the country want to show their support for a slogan not a fringe political party. As a supposed champion of free speech it really is bizarre you want them to stop simply because you and others are not willing to listen to what they say and instead assume they are showing support for the fringe political party.
Woah, hold on. There's a difference between me strongly disagreeing with what someone says or does and wanting to stop them doing it.
Free speech doesn't mean I (or you) have to be sanguine about everything someone else says or does that we disagree with. Sometimes we might disagree vociferously and argue strongly they should do something different instead.
The difference is wanting to exercise influence so they select an alternative choice, not prohibiting them outright for fear of not being able to win the argument.
If your easy solution is "they stop taking the knee" you are wanting to restrict their freedom of expression as they want to take the knee.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I can't believe that this country is not racist. The windrush deportations were, to my mind, evidence of outrageous institutional racism - a whole bureaucracy was set up with the apparent unspoken goal of deporting poor black people.
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
Two things can be true at once.
The UK in 2020 can be a lot less racist than it was in, say, 1960, and quite a bit less racist than many other nations now.
The UK in 2020 can still be racist in ways that really need to be sorted here and now.
Spot on, and not just 1960 but progressively each decade from then, so we should be proud of what we have achieved on race over that time, but we should continue on that journey so we can be equally proud in 2041 and 2051 too.
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.
Very very easy: they stop taking the knee.
What happened to freedom of expression?
If you're going to use that argument, then by the same token you're presumably happy with people booing in response?
Its not a big issue if a few people boo, no. And it would have been better if the players didnt do it every game for lots of months imo.
Whether you like it or not, lots of people in the country want to show their support for a slogan not a fringe political party. As a supposed champion of free speech it really is bizarre you want them to stop simply because you and others are not willing to listen to what they say and instead assume they are showing support for the fringe political party.
Woah, hold on. There's a difference between me strongly disagreeing with what someone says or does and wanting to stop them doing it.
Free speech doesn't mean I (or you) have to be sanguine about everything someone else says or does that we disagree with. Sometimes we might disagree vociferously and argue strongly they should do something different instead.
The difference is wanting to exercise influence so they select an alternative choice, not prohibiting them outright for fear of not being able to win the argument.
If your easy solution is "they stop taking the knee" you are wanting to restrict their freedom of expression as they want to take the knee.
No, I am arguing they should choose to stop taking the knee and adopt an alternative gesture instead.
It's about tactics and effectiveness in achieving their goals. It's quite a separate thing.
How’s about we go back to what Dr. King taught us, and treat people according to the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin?
Because this country by an large isnt all that racist anymore, yes we are still rooting out pockets of it but the truth is all those racism campaigners were virtually out of a job so they have latched on to a new money spinner with glee. They are just larcenous arseholes that would rather try and spin a fairy tale than get a proper job
I can't believe that this country is not racist. The windrush deportations were, to my mind, evidence of outrageous institutional racism - a whole bureaucracy was set up with the apparent unspoken goal of deporting poor black people.
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
Windrush happened though because of a cock up by the civil service destroying records they deemeed no longer of use. Then people couldnt prove it because the records had been destroyed I believe at the time the home office minister was jack straw, it was incompetence rather than malice.
As for convicted criminals well sorry I don't want them here and if there familes don't like being separated then they are free to go join their loved on in that third world hellhole as you put it.
Comments
To be fair, with only 12,000 on course there'll be plenty of room to move though I imagine they'll close off the cheaper enclosure and have everyone in the Royal and Queen Anne Enclosures. It's fortunate Ascot doesn't just rely on attendances to make the Royal meeting turn a profit.
So, while we might well see a rise, the evidence so far is that it is only a temporary spike.
We know from Dr Pagel writing in the Graun today that even the ISAGE zealots have given up on immediate massacre by Delta, and are preparing the next line of defence: that the vaccines work now, but protection will vanish by the Autumn and the massacre will happen then instead. They intend to declare "told you so" in October rather than July. In the meantime, we must have lockdown, lockdown and more lockdown, etc., etc.
If we simply keep accepting these prophesies of doom, then we might as well all lock ourselves up in our houses and sit there pissing ourselves in terror until those of us who haven't topped ourselves through depression finally perish of old age. Enough.
People talk about how there's a "Black Lives Matter Party" and therefore the term is political, but people care about the Tory Party, the Labour Party, the SNP and maybe a few people care about also-rans like the Lib Dems or the Greens. The people who in all sincerity think about a BLM Party is <0.001% of the electorate.
Donation to pb.com coffers.
If Ollie Robinson is the level, not very.
It's funny how anecdote and data are often very different.
Security sent packing after an altercation.
To be fair, Sky did distance themselves:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.skysports.com/amp/football/news/20876/12019566/black-lives-matter-sky-sports-statement
Personally I think they’d have been better dropping the logo after the controversy and replacing it with the kick it out logo.
Free stock, largely free volunteer staff, 80% off business rates, and pay no Corporation Tax on the profits.
And campaign forever about tax avoidance...
It's having a bet, watching some world-class racing and seeing some present and future champions - the rest of it is irrelevant.
Another way to look at this. Over the period of the chart, cases increased by 2241 (7 day average)
The proportion of the increase in cases represented by each group is
9.05% 0 to 14
76.66% 15 to 44
12.78% 45 to 64
1.02% 65 to 74
0.42% 75 to 84
0.06% 85+
Even allowing for the different sizes of the groups, it is quite clear where the issue is.
The following is the cases for each age group, with each age group scaled to "out of 100K"
It's about some footballers saying racism is bad. That's all. If you think it's twaddle then good for you. I would wonder why on earth but not think that makes you a racist.
The admissions is even more annoying - 18-64... I ask you.... We need to wait for data until tomorrow, but again, the trend is clear.
Fundamentally, the one and only justification for restrictions is "without them, the healthcare system will collapse." It's not to help the NHS catch up faster with its backlog, or to pursue a Zero Covid strategy, or anything else. If the healthcare system will survive the removal of mask mandates and social distancing then they should go, and that's the end of that.
In point of fact, I suspect the most likely outcome on June 21st is that social distancing is binned but we end up stuck with the stupid masks til God knows when (which wouldn't be so bad if it just applied in limited cases like getting on a train, but we may still be lumbered with them whenever we set foot inside a building that isn't our own house.) If that's the case then we're going to have to be very, very careful that they don't become permanent. It's as clear as day that, if we're still stuck with them come about September, the flu suppression excuse will then be deployed and we may never be rid of the wretched things.
I'd quite happily enjoy a good meal and a drink at a football or rugby match - anything to avoid the mind-numbing tedium of having to watch the game (if you can call it that).
County cricket's another one I can enjoy.
"Taking a knee" is disliked because it's seen as the thin end of a wedge that ends with iconoclasm and concepts like "white privilege". Indeed, sometimes those concepts are directly linked.
I'm afraid BLM as a movement is heavily politicised, and people do correlate the two.
This is why I talk about the importance of racial equality instead and focussing on addressing the real concerns black people have.
Unlike you, I don't see any problem in addressing all strands, nor looking for solutions that unite people rather than divide them - and I note you enthusiastically endorsed "the boot being on the other foot" earlier in the thread so I will take precisely no lectures from you.
https://www.armouredcarriers.com/uss-robin-hms-victorious
I remember my father who was in Plymouth with the Royal Navy for much of the war. Two US MPs or SPs (white) shot a black GI/sailor on the spot (I forget which) one evening for the crime of being a little tipsy and obstreperous. He still remembered the reaction of the RN crews to that incident.
That means there's 30% fewer unvaccinated adults now than there were a month ago.
In the past month the share of adult population to have received two doses of vaccine have gone from 31.8% to 53%
That means there's 31% fewer adults without two doses now than there were a month ago.
Considering that vaccinations are being prioritised based upon need there's frankly ever fewer and fewer people left to be infected, even if cases increase.
I've given up any hope of "balance" from the newspapers but at least we all know where they stand. That's not to say there aren't occasionally incisive and thought-provoking pieces but I find them a rarity among a whole lot of partisan piffle. That's probably why I read the Racing Post though the journalism on that paper is a shadow of what the old Sporting Life used to be.
"The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power."
But Greens would be an unforgiving audience.
So does yours truly!
With caveat that whoever invented the abomination called the "fascinator" should be horsewhipped!!!
Nonsense. The BLM website laid out their policies in black and white, their leader called herself a "trained Marxist" and this was widely trailed on the news. Just look at the cut-through phrases like "white privilege" have had through to the electorate in opinion polls too. The trouble was that a number of their activists also acted on these, most widely in the US but also here too with their desire to remove statues and see CRT extending into major institutions.
I agree that the issue should become apolitical but it's going in precisely the wrong direction at present.
In Newham, 120,000 adults (48%) over the age of 30 have yet to receive a first vaccination. That's not an insignificant number and while, to now, the Borough has managed to dodge most of the infection surges, I can't believe our "luck" will last forever.
I think with respect you spend an unhealthy amount of time on Twitter listening to phrases like "white privilege". I don't think I've ever heard that phrase uttered in real life. Nor "CRT" either. 🤷♂️
There was a grand total of one (1) statue I can think of removed in protests a year ago, you were saying then it was the thin end of the wedge but it was one slaver and then it stopped.
If they want to be acquire antibodies the hard way then that's their choice, there's nothing more to be done about it.
It is a question of whether to prioritise not splitting wards over minimising local authority crossing. For example, the BCE can have a single Bromley-Croydon crossing with a split ward or 2 crossings with no split ward
Quite simply the virus is running out of people to hospitalise faster than people are getting infected.
Do we have PBers old enough to have seen them "frequently"?
Real question.
We have about 185,000 registered electors in the two constituencies so I don't think there are three there within the current parameters (75,000 electors per constituency).
Traditionally there are a number of categories of current affairs. There is News, there is Opinion and Comment and there are wider General Interest stories, like where is nice to go for your holidays, what celebs do, back stories about political figures etc.
It seems to me that these have got confused. Recently I spent a few days with BBC Radio 4 being my only source (no internet, no papers, no telly). Focussing on this it became obvious that: actual news (ie what has just occurred of importance) is marginal; that what someone says is prioritised over reportage of actual events; that the BBC hides (not very well) the fact that it has opinions behind how it selects the reporting of the opinions of others.
An overwhelming significance was given to inconvenience to a small number (about 0.1% of the population) of people by changing rules about Portugal.
As to the actual reporting of major events like wars, international politics, and all the stuff we once thought central to 'News' - hardly a thing.
Which was tacked up on the door when the landlord was looking for a tenant, and meaning, restricted to White, non-Jewish people. Which was pretty common practice for many years, in many parts of the US.
I would expect some pitchforks for certain seats:
Buckingham and part of MK - unpopular but unavoidable
Part of S Staffs with either some of Dudley or Wolverhampton - again hard to avoid
Part of Northumberland with some of Tyne and Wear - unavoidable but I expect everyone will want somewhere else to be the crossover seat
I really hoped that the Black Lives Matter protests would start focussing on things like this rather than problems with police shootings which really do not apply in this country. These injustices still go on; children basically lose their fathers to destitution in foreign countries after they have completed their prison sentences. They are effectively banished under blair era legislation that gives vast powers to the state which are simply exercised in an inhumane way.
Ask yourself - why should people with afro carribbean heritage suffer this fate whereas ethnic white people do not? How is that fair?
There are people, disproportionately black people, that actually suffer banishment and get their lives ruined. No one supports them because they are drug dealers or have committed terrible crimes, but they still have families, and lives are actually ruined in tangible ways (ie they become destitute in third world countries with no local networks to support them), rather than suffering PTSD from microagressions or misspoken language or whatever.
You will find many people posting on here who are oestensibly on my side of the argument (I am definetely not woke) who claim not to be racist but then celebrate the deportation of foreign criminals. I just think this, as much as wokeness, marks the decline of our civilisation.
I'm not suggesting a conspiracy or anything like that, I'm simply reporting the Government's own numbers whether they are credible or not.
My argument goes like this - any Government has a primary responsibility to protect all its citizens even those who need protecting from themselves. There may be many reasons, as I've mentioned before, why people have not taken the vaccine.
The fact remains however if someone who has not been vaccinated contracts Covid and requires hospital treatment that's resources taken from other parts of the NHS. There is a pool of potentially vulnerable people in my part of the world who, if the Delta or some other variant takes hold, are at risk and that might precipitate a local or indeed London-wide health issue and perhaps the re-introduction of restrictions at least locally.
That's not to gainsay the wider lifting of restrictions but it's a reminder the public health emergency of this may not be over - indeed, I said as far back as last August when we were all out and about enjoying the sun that IF there were a second wave, the public would only have themselves to blame (that wasn't a popular view either).
With the vaccines, I am much more confident but the attitudes of some toward the unvaccinated concern me. My belief is the reasons why so many people in my area have refused the vaccine are far more complex than "stupidity" and stem from deep-seated cultural, religious and other mores which are going to be very hard to overcome.
Tough. It Lots people are aware of it. In fact, almost everyone is. That's why it's so contentious. It was widely reported in the MSM, and some of its leading proponents were very clear that's what it was about. Then, we had the very visceral images of statues coming down, demands for "decolonising" the curriculum, reparations, the withdrawal of television programmes and films, and some of the leading activists - and lots of talking heads - discussing "white privilege" and "white fragility". Hence the 80%+ cut through on the term in the opinion polls.
I spend little time on Twitter. I know about it because my daughter's school, and my workplace, have started preaching about it. It all starts from there.
And you're wrong about statues too. There were hundreds under threat last summer. Removals were arrested by the action of Oliver Dowden and HMG - otherwise many more would have come down - and there are still some more in the pipeline. Three statues were removed with another eighteen under review:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/edward-colston-more-statues-linked-to-slavery-may-fall-pjjvh38hm
PS. It's hard to respect you when given you 'liked' a post upthread by @OldKingCole insulting me and suggesting I wasn't interested in combatting racism.
Whether you like it or not, lots of people in the country want to show their support for a slogan not a fringe political party. As a supposed champion of free speech it really is bizarre you want them to stop simply because you and others are not willing to listen to what they say and instead assume they are showing support for the fringe political party.
Free speech doesn't mean I (or you) have to be sanguine about everything someone else says or does that we disagree with. Sometimes we might disagree vociferously and argue strongly they should do something different instead.
The difference is wanting to exercise influence so they select an alternative choice, not prohibiting them outright for fear of not being able to win the argument.
The UK in 2020 can be a lot less racist than it was in, say, 1960, and quite a bit less racist than many other nations now.
The UK in 2020 can still be racist in ways that really need to be sorted here and now.
It's about tactics and effectiveness in achieving their goals. It's quite a separate thing.
As for convicted criminals well sorry I don't want them here and if there familes don't like being separated then they are free to go join their loved on in that third world hellhole as you put it.