That's the biggest, shiniest and most expensive toy of all.
And? Are you saying that it’s likely to turn off voters in the north? ‘Vote Labour, the Tories have improved your rail services by freeing up masses of capacity.’
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
IMV NPR won't be abandoned - although as NPR hasn't particularly been defined yet, the definition of 'NPR' might be downgraded. Ideally it would see full connectivity with HS2 phase 2, and there have been some noises in that direction.
"Northern Powerhouse Rail" is already under construction. They are extending the power wires southwards to Church Fenton, and they have signed off 4 tracking and a flyover from Huddersfield to Ravensthorpe.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
NPR has evolved. Okay, I should have been more specific and said 'HS3' instead, but the problem there is that HS3 has morphed into the existing and planned NPR enhancements - as makes sense, because it's best if the enhancements and new lines work together.
Some of the originally-specced NPR projects have been completed. Others are ongoing. But the 'new' NPR is a very different beast.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
Yes - I've made myself unpopular in a couple of jobs by pointing out the groups that are "missing"
In IT in the City, at first glance Diversity Heaven. But there are groups who you don't see - WWC and settled West Indian*, for example.
*There are a fairish number of people of African origin - they are almost always 1st/2nd generation immigrants from Africa, though.
I have pointed out on a number of occasions that as a comprehensive schooled white male that I am under represented significantly in medical school admissions.
To be fair, the University recognises this and has adjusted the admissions process to remedy it.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
I couldn't give a f##k whether the teensy tiny minority of people who get into the stratified upper atmosphere are white, Indian, east Asian, or purple unicorns.
They're not representative of all people.
If you're concerned about school budgets then here's an idea to start with: talk about school budgets, not skin colour!
Which is where we started. It was the spin by Tories on the education select committee to distract from the real problems in education which took us down this cut de sac.
The reality is that Brexit was always going to have a relatively trivial effect on our economy for good or ill. On a placid lake we might have been able to identify the odd ripple and measure its effect. But we are in the middle of a force 10 hurricane right now and it isn't even background noise. Anyone sensible has so many more important things to worry about.
I have always said that Brexit will be a whimper rather than a bang economically, and that it is highly likely that people will look back and think "what was the point?" as their many grievances continue. Brexit will be a rust, not a bust.
That would be an enormous win for Boris and the Brexiteers. If the economics are meh then the ability to go our own way and hold those making our laws to account will be significant pluses.
Of course it won't solve every problem or even most of them. We still need to live in a world where every state's sovereignty is reined in by agreements, regulations etc and many of the problems blamed on the EU were in fact their response to those pressures which will not have gone away.
Good morning
I believe for every passing day, the introduction of our own laws including on state aid and various new trade deals, the likelihood of us rejoining the EU diminishes
Furthermore, the EU itself is in a poor state, with UVDL being a disaster especially with her vaccine rollout failure
This has been followed with the Merkel - Macron pairing being put back in their box over a summit with Putin and trying to prevent UK holidays makers going to the Mediterranean countries, and the general lack of agreement over many other issues
Merkel and Macron will both be gone next year.
Additionally only the SNP and Plaid will be standing at the next GE on a rejoin platform, so I do believe that those who just cannot be reconciled to Brexit will be in a permanent state of despair
The conservative party do have candidates to replace Boris and as I have said on many occasions , Rishi is my choice and I would be delighted too see him in place sooner rather than later and he is very popular in the country
Labour do not have a realistic alternative to Starmer and are being squeezed by the conservatives and lib dems with nowhere to go it seems
Very depressing if you are a Labour supporter
It can indeed be depressing, but our purpose is clear, things change quickly and it’s a meaningful consolation that we didn’t sell our souls to Boris to hang on to power. It must be nasty to be a conservative Conservative.
I note that nearly all the saner Tories, eg Big G, have now joined The Clown’s Fanclub. All those years they’ve just been puffing hot air. Who’d’ve thunk it?
Even this morning I have repeated my wish for Rishi to take over as soon as possible
I accept Boris is a winner, but unlike Labour when the time comes the conservatives have several candidates to replace Boris
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
I'd be interested to understand how you think the examples I am providing are evidence of 'white privilege'. They just strike me as examples of structural racism, when looked at objectively - and they need to be addressed.
The terms White Privilege and structural racism describe the same phenomena. The point of using the term "White Privilege", as I understand it, is to confront white people with the benefits they accrue from living in a society that discriminates against others (if it's harder for non-white people to get a job, for instance, it must be easier for white people). It puts the onus on them to think what they can do to change things. It's too easy to say "well I'm not a racist/some of my best friends are black/this has nothing to do with me" and move on.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
The middle class are very happy to take on all the other prejudices in the world such as against women, LGBTQ+, people of colour etc but are very happy to ignore, and indeed (in many cases) promote, class prejudice. Funnily enough, tackling class prejudice properly and taking concrete actions would have the real potential to hurt their interests, unlike all the others.
Yep which is why I detest the term "middle class" and all it stands for. If you have to get out of bed in a morning to pay your bills you are working class. If other people get out of bed in a morning to pay your bills then you're the monied class. Middle class gets promoted heavily by the monied to have the workers fighting against each other as a distraction.
It’s been a while since someone called me working class…
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
From my GCSE years through to my degree I have been taught any number of theories on history that I came to disagree with for one reason or another. Long Duration, Marxist History, Whig etc etc. Eventually I settled on micro history as the style that I wanted to write. But that's kind of the point isn't it? Teaching in the humanities isn't the passing on of facts it's showing you to think and analyse. If someone wanted to throw critical race theory into to the mix I would have been fine with that. Any teacher who tells students that it's the only way to view the past is a bad teacher and would be a bad teacher whatever type of historiography is currently fashionable.
That's the biggest, shiniest and most expensive toy of all.
And? Are you saying that it’s likely to turn off voters in the north? ‘Vote Labour, the Tories have improved your rail services by freeing up masses of capacity.’
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
IMV NPR won't be abandoned - although as NPR hasn't particularly been defined yet, the definition of 'NPR' might be downgraded. Ideally it would see full connectivity with HS2 phase 2, and there have been some noises in that direction.
"Northern Powerhouse Rail" is already under construction. They are extending the power wires southwards to Church Fenton, and they have signed off 4 tracking and a flyover from Huddersfield to Ravensthorpe.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
NPR has evolved. Okay, I should have been more specific and said 'HS3' instead, but the problem there is that HS3 has morphed into the existing and planned NPR enhancements - as makes sense, because it's best if the enhancements and new lines work together.
Some of the originally-specced NPR projects have been completed. Others are ongoing. But the 'new' NPR is a very different beast.
A new line to be constructed from Liverpool to Manchester via the centre of Warrington A new line to be constructed from Manchester to Leeds via the centre of Bradford
And the immediate thought is that those two items will be for the chop especially the Liverpool bit (the Manchester to Leeds bit is different because that line needs to be improved, the route is already running at capacity and you can justify spending money improving Bradford's connectivity.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Yes, the Applebaum article you link to is absolutely superb. It gives a really balanced view of the debate about CRC and 'wokeness' that I suspect few could object to.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
Well there's a sliding scale, isn't there? At one end parents take complete responsibility for their own children. At the other end you have Plato's republic. I wouldn't want to be in the position of orphaned or unafforable children left to go feral, but I'm much more comfortable with the former end of the scale than the latter.
Deliveries massively delayed due to driver shortage...
Maybe Waitrose should pay more to their drivers then.
Next issue?
Its interesting how little faith some people have in the free market. Need drivers? Pay them more and they will come and work for you. In pharmacy, for the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in the numbers of graduates trained. As a result pharmacists became mush less in demand as they were 'two a penny'. Consequence was the locum pay declined, and career prospects became less good. Its one reason why doctors are still very well paid - we have historically not trained enough, keeping them scarce. Of course free markets don't fix things instantly - it takes time, but good businesses adapt and thrive.
Deliveries massively delayed due to driver shortage...
Maybe Waitrose should pay more to their drivers then.
Next issue?
C'mon Phil, you're not daft. It's all well and good ramping up wages, but if the people aren't there to fill those posts then we're in trouble, until we can get people trained up. That's going to be the problem. And although I don't know how long it takes to train a HGV driver, or how it's paid for, it's the time lag that will cause problems over the coming weeks and months.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Why do you think the government should allow children from poor families to go hungry ?
They don’t - that’s why they have the benefits system. This was a proposed extension of benefits in a really patronising way (“you, poor person over there, yes you. You’re not responsible enough to feed your kids, so we are going to do it for you”)
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Education is a great leveling up for ethnic minorities, which the UK appears to do well compared with other nations. However, it would appear that employment is still another matter.
Employment disadvantage of minority ethnic groups still, however, persists. Men and women from most ethnic minority groups have lower employment rates among those economically active than their white majority counterparts. This disadvantage is reduced but not eliminated when we account for disadvantaged family origins. For example, taking account of social class origins, the employment gap for second-generation Pakistani men reduces from around 4 percentage points to around 1 percentage point, and for Pakistani women from around 5 percentage points to around 2 percentage points. This would suggest some of the employment gap is driven by the disadvantages faced by their parents that persist across generations and are reduced but not eliminated by educational success.
A lot of kids from minority groups do well at school precisely because their parents tell them you will have to be twice as qualified as a white candidate to get the job. It also explains why private schools can have more non-white pupils than state schools in the same area.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
The problem with Race Cars is much of the agenda is imported uncritically from the United States which until quite recently did have racial segregation, and did have laws that determined who is and is not Black (maybe it still does?). There is a reason most heavyweight boxing champions were White, for instance. Britain's problems, even with race, are often really about class.
A lot of private schools cast their net wide for pupils, and elites from other countries, either with or without UK residency are well represented. This from 2012:
This means, in a lot of the industries for which class is one of the primary barriers to entry (e.g. law being one), race is actually easier to address than class, because you have a very good supply of ethnic minority candidates of the 'right' background.
Which is a different thing to considering whether those self same privately educated, class priviliged ethnic minority people still get pulled by the police all the time.
Inherited and unearned privilege and its converse, inherited and unjustifiable disadvantage, whether from class or race or gender or anything else, always needs to be looked at in the round and the most egregious examples picked off first. The need for a Fairness agenda will never go away, and whether it is rebalancing trans rights or the concerns of left behind red wall towns, the ability to run any fairness agenda in an even handed way, to consider all fairness as part of the same overarching mission, and to be widely trusted to do so, should be an absolutely cornerstone of any modern centre-left party. Equal fairness for all.
You're not available to be the next leader of the Labour Party are you, by any chance?
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
From my GCSE years through to my degree I have been taught any number of theories on history that I came to disagree with for one reason or another. Long Duration, Marxist History, Whig etc etc. Eventually I settled on micro history as the style that I wanted to write. But that's kind of the point isn't it? Teaching in the humanities isn't the passing on of facts it's showing you to think and analyse. If someone wanted to throw critical race theory into to the mix I would have been fine with that. Any teacher who tells students that it's the only way to view the past is a bad teacher and would be a bad teacher whatever type of historiography is currently fashionable.
Absolutely. But the overwhelming view from the right seems to be that 'critical race theory' is some scary and dangerous thing. As opposed to a valid, but obviously limited way of looking at the world. Over here we are experiencing a few mild aftershocks, but in the US it's a full blown moral panic.
That's the biggest, shiniest and most expensive toy of all.
And? Are you saying that it’s likely to turn off voters in the north? ‘Vote Labour, the Tories have improved your rail services by freeing up masses of capacity.’
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
IMV NPR won't be abandoned - although as NPR hasn't particularly been defined yet, the definition of 'NPR' might be downgraded. Ideally it would see full connectivity with HS2 phase 2, and there have been some noises in that direction.
"Northern Powerhouse Rail" is already under construction. They are extending the power wires southwards to Church Fenton, and they have signed off 4 tracking and a flyover from Huddersfield to Ravensthorpe.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
NPR has evolved. Okay, I should have been more specific and said 'HS3' instead, but the problem there is that HS3 has morphed into the existing and planned NPR enhancements - as makes sense, because it's best if the enhancements and new lines work together.
Some of the originally-specced NPR projects have been completed. Others are ongoing. But the 'new' NPR is a very different beast.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
Yes - I've made myself unpopular in a couple of jobs by pointing out the groups that are "missing"
In IT in the City, at first glance Diversity Heaven. But there are groups who you don't see - WWC and settled West Indian*, for example.
*There are a fairish number of people of African origin - they are almost always 1st/2nd generation immigrants from Africa, though.
I have pointed out on a number of occasions that as a comprehensive schooled white male that I am under represented significantly in medical school admissions.
To be fair, the University recognises this and has adjusted the admissions process to remedy it.
Do you find that such applicants are less likely to be successful? Or is it that you don't get as many applications from white males who went to comprehensives? If it's the former then I can understand looking at the admissions process (and I think I've told you about my friend from that background who got four As at AS and then A Level and didn't get a single interview when he applied to four medical schools). But if you don't get as many applications to start with, well then the issue is what's happening at school.
My own personal experience is that I was never really encouraged to think about what I would like to do at university. My biggest regret in life was not picking the right A-Levels because it was only once I started mixing with posher kids at sixth form college that I realised what I should have picked.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
Deliveries massively delayed due to driver shortage...
What is anecdata. It is not data - it is an anecdote.
Shelves being empty is data, local stock level of product X =0.
As for the actual issue - it's a matter now of increasing supply of drivers.
Which means either adding the skill to the shortages list (where the sounds from the Government are now very different to those the industry was hearing last week) and removing other barriers to increases tests and training.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Perhaps most of all they all but ignore the Napoleonic wars.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
Perhaps. Looking at the past 200 years of history there has been plenty of division and those old white cars have had it good for quite some time.
All change especially of attitude inevitably involves some degree of overshoot. We might be in that time now (and also wrt eg. trans rights). But that will settle back down at which point we will have a more imo appropriate attitude to race, class, sex, etc.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
That book misses the point entirely, it seems to me. Black and white are both terrible colours for a car, they show up the dirt way too easily.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
That book misses the point entirely, it seems to me. Black and white are both terrible colours for a car, they show up the dirt way too easily.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
I thought it was 20K?
Or that fact that the Napoleonic Wars were going on - which you might have thought would appear in conversation with officers in Militia....
(((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you @mateosfo · Jun 29 Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about.
Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
Which basically says if your sweat cannot evaporate you can be killed at 28C / 82F
During a 2001 heatwave it hit 60C in India. I forget the figures but I think at least tens of thousands ended up dead.
Professor Tim Palmer was good on the radio this morning pointing out that it's the combination of heat and humidity that's really deadly. A wet-bulb potential temperature above 35C is fatal to everyone.
Yes, there's no means of maintaining your core temperature if evaporation doesn't cool your skin to 35C or below. That's the minimum temperature gradient required.
And if the web-bulb is above 37C, that's definitely not good for your lungs.
Note, though, that parts of British Columbia east of the Cascades are actually desert and some deep valleys do trap heat, so temperatures above 40C are reasonably common, and humidity is not that high, unlike nearer the coast. 49C, though...
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
There's a complete absence of class conflict in Austen. That is a point of interest, but tyring to read the novels through the prism of this absence of class conflict would not add much.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Perhaps most of all they all but ignore the Napoleonic wars.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
For the same reason that Harry Potter is set in an apparently wonderful boarding school. Escapism.
Which is why "Fast and the Furious 37" will get a much higher box office than the Ken Loach film released the same week.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
Perhaps. Looking at the past 200 years of history there has been plenty of division and those old white cars have had it good for quite some time.
All change especially of attitude inevitably involves some degree of overshoot. We might be in that time now (and also wrt eg. trans rights). But that will settle back down at which point we will have a more imo appropriate attitude to race, class, sex, etc.
Yes, all fashion trends include excess and absurdity, why should education be immune? It doesn't invalidate the perspective entirely.
If the history of empire was still taught the way my parents were in the 1930s, then that would be astonishingly ignorant.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
That book misses the point entirely, it seems to me. Black and white are both terrible colours for a car, they show up the dirt way too easily.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
I imagine Dura Ace would be out there rubbing his wife's bumper in all weathers, though.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
That book misses the point entirely, it seems to me. Black and white are both terrible colours for a car, they show up the dirt way too easily.
White cars are good in the heat, as they reflect more sun rather than absorb it.
The reality is that Brexit was always going to have a relatively trivial effect on our economy for good or ill. On a placid lake we might have been able to identify the odd ripple and measure its effect. But we are in the middle of a force 10 hurricane right now and it isn't even background noise. Anyone sensible has so many more important things to worry about.
I have always said that Brexit will be a whimper rather than a bang economically, and that it is highly likely that people will look back and think "what was the point?" as their many grievances continue. Brexit will be a rust, not a bust.
That would be an enormous win for Boris and the Brexiteers. If the economics are meh then the ability to go our own way and hold those making our laws to account will be significant pluses.
Of course it won't solve every problem or even most of them. We still need to live in a world where every state's sovereignty is reined in by agreements, regulations etc and many of the problems blamed on the EU were in fact their response to those pressures which will not have gone away.
Good morning
I believe for every passing day, the introduction of our own laws including on state aid and various new trade deals, the likelihood of us rejoining the EU diminishes
Furthermore, the EU itself is in a poor state, with UVDL being a disaster especially with her vaccine rollout failure
This has been followed with the Merkel - Macron pairing being put back in their box over a summit with Putin and trying to prevent UK holidays makers going to the Mediterranean countries, and the general lack of agreement over many other issues
Merkel and Macron will both be gone next year.
Additionally only the SNP and Plaid will be standing at the next GE on a rejoin platform, so I do believe that those who just cannot be reconciled to Brexit will be in a permanent state of despair
The conservative party do have candidates to replace Boris and as I have said on many occasions , Rishi is my choice and I would be delighted too see him in place sooner rather than later and he is very popular in the country
Labour do not have a realistic alternative to Starmer and are being squeezed by the conservatives and lib dems with nowhere to go it seems
Very depressing if you are a Labour supporter
It can indeed be depressing, but our purpose is clear, things change quickly and it’s a meaningful consolation that we didn’t sell our souls to Boris to hang on to power. It must be nasty to be a conservative Conservative.
I note that nearly all the saner Tories, eg Big G, have now joined The Clown’s Fanclub. All those years they’ve just been puffing hot air. Who’d’ve thunk it?
Even this morning I have repeated my wish for Rishi to take over as soon as possible
I accept Boris is a winner, but unlike Labour when the time comes the conservatives have several candidates to replace Boris
For the last 30 years Conservative PMs/leaders (except Dave C?) seem to have knife wielding assassins waiting in the wings...it must be exhausting... Labour's leaders have it easy.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
I thought it was 20K?
Or that fact that the Napoleonic Wars were going on - which you might have thought would appear in conversation with officers in Militia....
Yes Jane Austen didn't really do gritty realism and social commentary.
I still have no idea what possessed my GCSE English teacher to teach it to his all boys class. Something more blood and guts would have got much more of a reaction.
I thought the first verse of Deutschlandlied was quite pre-Nazi? IIRC it was supposed to be about putting a United Germany first - back when a unified Germany was a political dream in the early 19th cent....
During a 2001 heatwave it hit 60C in India. I forget the figures but I think at least tens of thousands ended up dead.
Professor Tim Palmer was good on the radio this morning pointing out that it's the combination of heat and humidity that's really deadly. A wet-bulb potential temperature above 35C is fatal to everyone.
Yes, there's no means of maintaining your core temperature if evaporation doesn't cool your skin to 35C or below. That's the minimum temperature gradient required.
And if the web-bulb is above 37C, that's definitely not good for your lungs.
Note, though, that parts of British Columbia east of the Cascades are actually desert and some deep valleys do trap heat, so temperatures above 40C are reasonably common, and humidity is not that high, unlike nearer the coast. 49C, though...
(((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you @mateosfo · Jun 29 Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about.
Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
Which basically says if your sweat cannot evaporate you can be killed at 28C / 82F
The point he makes about weather forecasts is really important. We're hearing a lot about the record dry-bulb temperatures in Canada now, but it's the wet-bulb temperatures that are important.
The high wet-bulb temperatures are really deadly because they will kill you even if you act sensibly (drink water, stay in the shade, etc).
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
Perhaps. Looking at the past 200 years of history there has been plenty of division and those old white cars have had it good for quite some time.
All change especially of attitude inevitably involves some degree of overshoot. We might be in that time now (and also wrt eg. trans rights). But that will settle back down at which point we will have a more imo appropriate attitude to race, class, sex, etc.
Yes, all fashion trends include excess and absurdity, why should education be immune? It doesn't invalidate the perspective entirely.
If the history of empire was still taught the way my parents were in the 1930s, then that would be astonishingly ignorant.
Yes, but it isn't still taught that way. Teaching of history is in no way done in a way which unduly paints the British as the good guys. And yet there is a whole branch of popular 'this is what they didn't teach you' history publishing which seems to assume the set text for school history continues to be 1066 And All That.
That's the biggest, shiniest and most expensive toy of all.
And? Are you saying that it’s likely to turn off voters in the north? ‘Vote Labour, the Tories have improved your rail services by freeing up masses of capacity.’
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
IMV NPR won't be abandoned - although as NPR hasn't particularly been defined yet, the definition of 'NPR' might be downgraded. Ideally it would see full connectivity with HS2 phase 2, and there have been some noises in that direction.
"Northern Powerhouse Rail" is already under construction. They are extending the power wires southwards to Church Fenton, and they have signed off 4 tracking and a flyover from Huddersfield to Ravensthorpe.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
NPR has evolved. Okay, I should have been more specific and said 'HS3' instead, but the problem there is that HS3 has morphed into the existing and planned NPR enhancements - as makes sense, because it's best if the enhancements and new lines work together.
Some of the originally-specced NPR projects have been completed. Others are ongoing. But the 'new' NPR is a very different beast.
Completely new lines Liverpool to Manchester and Manchester-Bradford-Leeds does not sound small beer.
If they happen. But the point is that RP said that NPR was already under construction. Which it is, but also rather ignores the fact that the definition of NPR has radically changed (and for the better, IMO).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
My 993 Carrera Convertible is grandprixweiß too. Speedgelb and Arenarot are the most sought after 993 colours. If you find one with good original paint then buy. I can get you a sick hook up on any mechanical parts.
Unless you regularly clay bar, wax and polish any colour looks like shit.
I thought the first verse of Deutschlandlied was quite pre-Nazi? IIRC it was supposed to be about putting a United Germany first - back when a unified Germany was a political dream in the early 19th cent....
Back when a unified Germany was to stretch from the Meuse to the Memel and from the Adige to the Belt.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
There's a complete absence of class conflict in Austen. That is a point of interest, but tyring to read the novels through the prism of this absence of class conflict would not add much.
Well, several times her work is about "the domestic flutterings" of the top of the Middle class and their interactions with the lower part of the Upper class. Mr Darcy has to be convinced that Liz (and family) are "the done thing"...
Betting post: Surprised to see Javid at such long odds for next CP leader. I've just placed a bet with Bet365 at 22/1. Odds are lower than that on the spreads and 14/1 with some other trad bookies.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
Perhaps. Looking at the past 200 years of history there has been plenty of division and those old white cars have had it good for quite some time.
All change especially of attitude inevitably involves some degree of overshoot. We might be in that time now (and also wrt eg. trans rights). But that will settle back down at which point we will have a more imo appropriate attitude to race, class, sex, etc.
Yes, all fashion trends include excess and absurdity, why should education be immune? It doesn't invalidate the perspective entirely.
If the history of empire was still taught the way my parents were in the 1930s, then that would be astonishingly ignorant.
Yes, but it isn't still taught that way. Teaching of history is in no way done in a way which unduly paints the British as the good guys. And yet there is a whole branch of popular 'this is what they didn't teach you' history publishing which seems to assume the set text for school history continues to be 1066 And All That.
1066 And All That has a brilliant line in subversive sarcasm. Far more entertaining and informative than many dreary texts....
Hence the extreme popularity of Horrible Histories, which took the idea and ran with it.
On topic, why is Raab only 4%? He is the value bet.
It does seem more likely that the next Prime Minister will be Conservative. Boris will surely retire if the polls turn against him and may well retire anyway in order to leave a job he may not enjoy in order to bring in the spondulicks. Raab though? The trouble is, as we saw under Mrs Thatcher and New Labour, that there will be any number of here today, gone tomorrow bright young things who often do not even hang around to contest the leadership. I'd not put you off backing our esteemed Foreign Secretary but why not wait?
Though my large bet on France to win Euro 2020 suggests my forecasting abilities are not what Dominic Cummings would call super.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Perhaps most of all they all but ignore the Napoleonic wars.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
As someone who suffered periodic and sometimes significant ill-health through my teens and early twenties, including many operations, I'd argue a significant 'privilege' for children is good health.
(edited 'significant' for 'insignificant'. Which rather changed the tone of the post...)
I thought the first verse of Deutschlandlied was quite pre-Nazi? IIRC it was supposed to be about putting a United Germany first - back when a unified Germany was a political dream in the early 19th cent....
As discussed last night, rather tainted by the "Deutschland uber alles" chants for Hitler at the 1936 Olympics. The first two verses haven't been used since the war.
Hush your mouth. @Dura_Ace's wife had a...WHITE CAR. I think it was a Porsche or Hispano Suiza or something. But it was white.
My 993 Carrera Convertible is grandprixweiß too. Speedgelb and Arenarot are the most sought after 993 colours. If you find one with good original paint then buy. I can get you a sick hook up on any mechanical parts.
Unless you regularly clay bar, wax and polish any colour looks like shit.
What work is involved with clay bar? I've heard about this but never tried it. Do you do it yourself or pay someone?
I've been trying Autoglym Ultra HD Wax, which is very good but to be honest I don't find it any better than Autoglym Extra Gloss Protection (which is cheaper and much easier to apply).
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Perhaps most of all they all but ignore the Napoleonic wars.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
Yes - I've made myself unpopular in a couple of jobs by pointing out the groups that are "missing"
In IT in the City, at first glance Diversity Heaven. But there are groups who you don't see - WWC and settled West Indian*, for example.
*There are a fairish number of people of African origin - they are almost always 1st/2nd generation immigrants from Africa, though.
I don't know how generally true this is, but my limited experience has been that the gender balance in IT is better in those with a South or South-East Asian background than for other groups.
Not what I'd expect from the traditional view of those demographics.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
I’m actually a huge fan of breakfast clubs in particular. Good nutrition is a key part of education. Free school meals are a bit of a blunt instrument but they serve a role.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits - I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Common sense innit?
The more that you look in to critical race theory, which is overwhelmingly the basis for woke ideas, the more it becomes apparent that it is an elite cult which dresses itself up as a movement that seeks social justice. This is in much the same way that democractic socialism (or literal communism!) can dress itself up as moderate social democracy, as it did with Corbyn and McDonnell.
When I was very young, I was somewhat surprised about Malcom X and his attitude towards rich white people trying to joing The Movement.
Then I encountered the kind of people in question - they turn such causes into All About Them.
Reading descriptions of many of the backers of the Bolsheviks in Russia, exactly the same kind of idiots. The Revolution As Therapy.
My objection to the current anti-racism movement is based on the fact that no one seems to be campaigning against the actual racism that exists in society. For instance, I have pointed out that the Home office still maintain a policy of casually revoking the citizenship rights of black people (and other people of colour who are overwhelmingly descended from immigrants) when they are caught up in the criminal justice system, effectively adding lifetime banishment and exile as an extra punishment to a prison sentence. Another example of rampant racism is that faced by gypsies and travellers.
It suggests to me that this is actually an elite class struggle, with the woke being the aspirational elite using the George Floyds of this world as pawns in their battle for power.
So you object to the notion of white privilege and then give prima facie examples of white privilege. The elite you speak of absolutely exist, I just described them as "the monied". Have a look at what race they are. That doesn't mean that all white people are then privileged - far from it. But they don't suffer the very iniquities you just described. You could have added onto it the justice system's treatment of non-whites.
I am privileged by the colour of my skin that I won't be treated as a second class citizen by the authorities, or be racially abused in the street, or turned down for a job because of my name etc etc etc. That by itself doesn't make me better off - I have inherited nothing and have worked my arse off. But it does mean that my skin colour isn't an anchor dragging me back as you describe.
This is probably as good a description of critical race theory as any other. Why it has anyone particularly scared or outraged is something of a puzzle to me.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/milley-critical-race-theory-marxism-racism-fox-news/619308/ At that time critical race theory, a line of scholarship that identifies ways that racism has shaped institutions, was a phenomenon confined to obscure legal journals, and we didn’t read Pride and Prejudice or anything else from that perspective. But similar ideas had been floating around for decades. Famously, the critic Edward Said argued in a 1993 essay titled “Jane Austen and Empire” that what was not said about slavery and colonialism in Austen’s novels was highly significant. Austen’s father was a trustee of a sugar plantation in Antigua. That it relied on slave labor helps explain some of her family’s wealth; sugar plantations also explained the wealth of some characters in her novels. And yet they rarely talk about slavery. Being aware of their silence won’t help you understand why Elizabeth finally marries Mr. Darcy or why Mr. Darcy saves Lydia, and it certainly won’t explain the deep appeal of Austen’s novel across time and geography. If the absence of conversation about slavery is the only thing you know about Austen, then your understanding of her books will be severely impoverished. But if you are an Austen scholar, or just an Austen fan, knowing about the unmentioned sugar plantations opens up new ways of thinking about Austen and the world she inhabited. And that, in the end, is the point of scholarship...
It is, of course, of particular salience in the US, where racism shaped the founding documents of their institutions in fundamental ways - but even there it's just one lens among many through which to view things. It's far from irrelevant to the story of Britain, but our history is a great deal more tangled.
Austen's novels are notorious for being about the domestic flutterings of the gentry while ignoring the wider world.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
Perhaps most of all they all but ignore the Napoleonic wars.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
Not at all - in Persuasion, Wentworth's fortune is founded on prizes taken in the Napoleonic wars. Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
The real "Wentworth" was coal, of course.
Which the NCB mined right up to the house (including the gardens), 'cos privilege.
I think the semis will be Italy - Spain / Denmark - England. I think Belgium would win it all if VdB and E Hazard were fully fit, but they're crocked so the Italians will prevail.
The white privilege issue is yet another example of how a perfectly reasonable concept gets put through the mincing machine of American terminology and comes out the other side as something completely alien to British (especially working class British) ears. It's the culture war equivalent of what we were talking about yesterday with school "proms" and graduation ceremonies. It's an insidious problem, an invasive lexicon that alienates people on all sides of the various political divides.
"White privilege" struggles as a phrase because in British English privilege has a particular meaning. It means "poshness". No amount of explaining can eliminate this. So you tell a WWC person they have white privilege and it jars. "I'm not privileged, I grew up in a council estate". An American term that doesn't translate.
Other recent examples: from the left, "defund the police" which sounds like nonsense in a country where the police service like many others suffers from chronic underfunding. The British English interpretation is let's spend less on policing. From the right, references to "liberals" (British English translation: yellow rosette wearing centrists), "socialised medicine" (what?) and obsession with various "amendments" which have absolutely no meaning here. I would say the terminology of the American left has crept further into British politics than the right, largely because the preoccupations of the latter - abortion, gun rights, imaginary voter fraud - are mainly so completely alien in most of the UK that they are just ignored as exotic.
Perhaps for the good of UK social cohesion we need some British equivalent of the Academie Francaise.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Looks like being an interesting argument. One benefit of the Mail "ultra-long screed to attract Google" technique is that a lot of information is laid out.
Including this:
The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.
It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.
It would be interesting to see that litigated. FSU have been a bit of a Rottweiler on this particular issue, and had a certain amount of success.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
The problem with Race Cars is much of the agenda is imported uncritically from the United States which until quite recently did have racial segregation, and did have laws that determined who is and is not Black (maybe it still does?). There is a reason most heavyweight boxing champions were White, for instance. Britain's problems, even with race, are often really about class.
I agree with that, although I think it’s wealth not class that embeds issues in the Uk. Certainly my foundation is very focused on making sure everyone has the chance to fulfil their potential
(((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you @mateosfo · Jun 29 Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about.
Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
Which basically says if your sweat cannot evaporate you can be killed at 28C / 82F
The point he makes about weather forecasts is really important. We're hearing a lot about the record dry-bulb temperatures in Canada now, but it's the wet-bulb temperatures that are important.
The high wet-bulb temperatures are really deadly because they will kill you even if you act sensibly (drink water, stay in the shade, etc).
Worth bearing in mind though that dry bulb temperatures and low humidity are often the biggest killers in the Western US and Canada (and Australia) as it's very hot and dry conditions that trigger the worst forest fires. Most climate related deaths in the US West in the last few years have been from fire.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
That's the biggest, shiniest and most expensive toy of all.
And? Are you saying that it’s likely to turn off voters in the north? ‘Vote Labour, the Tories have improved your rail services by freeing up masses of capacity.’
The one that I think will be announced and then abandoned is NPR. Which is a depressing thought because it’s very badly needed.
IMV NPR won't be abandoned - although as NPR hasn't particularly been defined yet, the definition of 'NPR' might be downgraded. Ideally it would see full connectivity with HS2 phase 2, and there have been some noises in that direction.
"Northern Powerhouse Rail" is already under construction. They are extending the power wires southwards to Church Fenton, and they have signed off 4 tracking and a flyover from Huddersfield to Ravensthorpe.
"No no, there was no plan for a high speed line, this is it" say all the new Tories in the area. Whats worse is that so few people know what actual NPR was that people will probably buy it.
Same with the towns fund where red wall Tory MPs are busy announcing that they are all spending the same money. Yes the money doesn't actually exist so very little will be spent. But people are largely disinterested in politics and don't track the details. So they'll vote for the announcement that Good is coming and miss the fact that it hasn't yet arrived.
Don't say they won't, they already have. For Labour. For decades.
NPR has evolved. Okay, I should have been more specific and said 'HS3' instead, but the problem there is that HS3 has morphed into the existing and planned NPR enhancements - as makes sense, because it's best if the enhancements and new lines work together.
Some of the originally-specced NPR projects have been completed. Others are ongoing. But the 'new' NPR is a very different beast.
You missed my point love. They can faff with the HS3 route as much as they like - it won't get built. What will end up being "NPR" is the existing Standege route with some capacity / speed improvements.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Looks like being an interesting argument. One benefit of the Mail "ultra-long screed to attract Google" technique is that a lot of information is laid out.
Including this:
The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.
It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.
It would be interesting to see that litigated. FSU have been a bit of a Rottweiler on this particular issue, and had a certain amount of success.
(Rottweiler joke: what has 4 legs and an arm?)
The quotation you include from the Mail is revealing. Toby Young's FSU did their best to get parents to whistle blow and found the promotion of partisan political views in "no fewer than 15 English schools"! Fifteen? Relatively, that's a miniscule number - is that the best they can do? So, a tiny problem rather than a huge issue.
Going by this, and from my own extensive professional experience, you are more likely to die from Covid than to find a state school that focuses on white privilege/wokeness/partisan political views.
Perhaps Charles and others who want to avoid the woke stuff should save their money and support their local state schools. Seems to me to be more of a problem in private schools, like ASL (and Eton apparently), than state schools.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
I'm not intending to disappear down this particular cul-de-sac and have already posted that class has as much to do with it as race. Its just that most of the people who manage to get into the stratified upper atmosphere of A+++ are white.
The real outrage about "white privilege" shouldn't be that it self-evidently is there for a tiny minority, it should be that those people then work very hard to keep the WWC in the gutter.
We saw the ludicrous situation last week of "concerned" Tories unhappy that poor white kids do so badly in school. The same Tories consistently vote to cut schools budgets, cut council services budgets and even not to feed them in the holidays and then wonder why their kids do so badly in school...
Why do you think the taxpayer should feed children instead of their parents?
Says the chap who can afford £32k pa per child for school fees. Are you against Free School Meals for poor families, Charles? Presumably you are, as that is the taxpayer feeding children instead of their parents.
Doesn't think the taxpayer should feed hungry poor kids. Sends his daughter to a £32k a year school. Gets Very Upset that they teach white privilege.
Hmmm. Isn't Charles the very definition of white privilege? Multi-generational power and wealth and says no to pennies to feed hungry kids in inner cities.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
Who do you think supplied Gibraltar with the vaccines?
That’s why I am saying it’s UK vaccines in EU arms in first line. Duh.
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
What mistake? We offered Ireland the vaccines and Ireland said no.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes? Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
No, Maguire deserves to be booked just for being so ugly. He's no Jack Grealish, is he?
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
Needs reversing, was a clear dive from the German player.
At what point does a party say it doesn't want votes from a certain demographic and stands tall when people ask them why?
I don't think I want Labour going after Palestinian obsessed, anti-LGBT people, that's not the kind of Labour Party I want to vote for. And I think they should get away from these issues.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
No, Maguire deserves to be booked just for being so ugly. He's no Jack Grealish, is he?
No, it's Grealish who deserves to be booked just because the chicks like him.
Mr. Pioneers, I've heard that non-white people also get to have lots of money. And lots of white people don't have much money.
White privilege is a bloody stupid term.
Of course its a stupid term. It is far more nuanced than that. But it quite evidently is there. As is the other massive divider - class. WWC kids and their parents don't feel white privilege and I absolutely understand why. Then again they can't see it from the other side of the race divide where their kids are far less likely to be harassed by the police, suffer from abuse and discrimination because of the colour of their skin or even their name etc etc.
Where the WWC get discriminated against is class. Posh whitey sending their kids to fee paying schools don't want to spend their money on the WWC. So they vote in MPs who vote against feeding hungry white kids in massively poor areas who then bemoan the poor educational attainment of kids they voted to keep hungry. And then use this as proof that there is no white privilege such as having a spare £32k to spend on school fees per child.
Are such schools exclusively white? Of course not! But look how hard it is for non-white parents to be in that position compared to white parents. It does happen, but in tiny numbers. And when its a tiny percentage of the population in a position to spend that kind of cash on school fees, its a truly tiny percentage of non-whites.
Schools like that cannot pretend they are ordinary, that their students are ordinary. All of them are massively and extraordinarily privileged to a level that most kids can barely conceive of. Teaching them that - and that with privilege comes responsibility - is surely a basic. I do with my kids and their level of privilege is nothing compared to Charles et al
I do have to wonder how much actual experience of these schools you have. My kids went to Dundee HS for the last 20 years in total. When my eldest started the school was very white, as, in fairness, was middle class Dundee. At my sons leaving ceremony last week the majority of his class was white Scots but only just. There is a very large minority of Asians , mainly Indian but a reasonable number of Chinese and fewer Africans. What is significant is that the proportion of both Indians and Chinese is much, much higher than they are in the city. This seems to reflect 2 things. Firstly, the social economic success of those communities (lots of doctors) and , secondly, societal values that put much greater value on education than many indigenous Scots today. The result is that the child of an Indian doctor or Chinese scientist is far more likely to be privileged with a decent education than the child of white Scottish parents. Really don’t see where white privilege comes into this.
Well the evidence is that despite class privilege they don't do as well as their white peers after university.
This featured in the much derided and since ignored government report into race earlier this year.
“Black” is too wide a generality. Both Indians and Chinese earn more on average than whites. Other groups do less well. Some of the reasons they do afflict our poor whites too. Disrupted families, poor role models, poor housing etc. This is a broader and more general point that certainly needs a lot more attention than it is getting if we are to maximise the potential of our society but my point was much narrower: the cliche that private schools are bastions of white privilege is simply wrong.
I wonder what happens if you control for British children in private schools.
Private schools are more of a bastion of privilege in our society than ever because they have lifted their game at the same time as general standards in education have declined. Don’t dispute that for a second. It’s just not white privilege, at least not anymore.
I say that (respectfully) I know little about the private school sector. Suspect that not all fee paying schools are the same though. How many of your doctor examples could afford £32k a year? How many local Lairds can?
The issue in education is class, not race. The monied class don't want to pay anything to bring up the poorest from their low levels of attainment. That the monied are very largely (though not exclusively) white is a side note.
Mr. Pioneers, you may have missed it but Mr. Charles specifically said that he was against the feeding not the money (ie it's the parents' job to feed the child, and if benefits are insufficient that's a different matter). Moving responsibility from parent to state was the criticism.
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
Have I got this right? You were sending your daughter to the £32k a year (Jeeeesus...) American School London and pulled her out because they were teaching students about white privilege?
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of white privilege to many. Even to those of us who are white who don't have a spare £32k a year for school fees.
Quite the opposite to me Rochdale!
£32k a year on school fees might be seen as the literal embodiment of money privilege to many. It has nothing to do with skin colour.
I would not be remotely surprised that many of those able to afford to send their kids to the school would be non-white and the notion that a white kid from Rochdale, or Birkenhead, or Hartlepool etc is "privileged" while a kid going to the ASL school because their parents can afford to pay £32k per year isn't due to their skin colour rather shows what is wrong with this ridiculous idea.
Looks like being an interesting argument. One benefit of the Mail "ultra-long screed to attract Google" technique is that a lot of information is laid out.
Including this:
The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.
It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.
It would be interesting to see that litigated. FSU have been a bit of a Rottweiler on this particular issue, and had a certain amount of success.
(Rottweiler joke: what has 4 legs and an arm?)
The quotation you include from the Mail is revealing. Toby Young's FSU did their best to get parents to whistle blow and found the promotion of partisan political views in "no fewer than 15 English schools"! Fifteen? Relatively, that's a miniscule number - is that the best they can do? So, a tiny problem rather than a huge issue.
Going by this, and from my own extensive professional experience, you are more likely to die from Covid than to find a state school that focuses on white privilege/wokeness/partisan political views.
Perhaps Charles and others who want to avoid the woke stuff should save their money and support their local state schools. Seems to me to be more of a problem in private schools, like ASL (and Eton apparently), than state schools.
I don't know - I would be interested to see some of this out in the wash.
I think it's fantastic that ASL teach their pupils about privilege of any kind, including race, class, sex, etc.
These people are likely to become influencers and important (or as we must come to call them, quarantine evaders) in future.
Going to a school which doesn't include this on the syllabus is a missed opportunity.
It would be left to the parents to impress upon their children their privileged status. Sadly, I don't think that every such parent will be as diligent in explaining this to their children as @Charles of course will be.
The problem is they go beyond a describe of the world as it is.
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
But there *IS* division. I agree that the example is crude, but the point being made is valid. Why is it always the monied class (who are almost always but not exclusively white) who want to stifle discussion of this to promote "unity".
Football last night - anyone else think that Maguire booking was an error? Not sure if here is a post match appeals process but England should appeal it I think.
Yep, looked like Goretzka fouled him rather than the other way round.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
Who do you think supplied Gibraltar with the vaccines?
That’s why I am saying it’s UK vaccines in EU arms in first line. Duh.
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
What mistake? We offered Ireland the vaccines and Ireland said no.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes? Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
The governments mistake handling this will become increasingly obvious to everyone. With vaccines and virus UK is not a island, lovely eggs, lovely basket, but other things had to be happening simultaneously.
That was just used as a mechanism to give him some money. It's one of the few times the existence of the war is actually mentioned.
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
As a slight fan of Austen, this is an interesting conversation. A question: would she have sold more books if she had mentioned the war? Did readers at the time want references to it, or would it just have been assumed to be in the background? She was writing for people of her period, not for us, 200 years in the future.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
I think she was selling escapism.
In Austen's world, the Army, Navy and Marines served to provide uniforms for minor gentry to wear to social occasions.
Finding an article in an encyclopaedia of her world containing an article on the benefits of Mr Seppings diagonal bracing method and its application to ships of the line would be a bit weird.
Comments
Which sounds sensible, but meant that projects in London and the South East often had a ridiculous advantage in the funding battles.
The howling over this in certain quarters is quite interesting.
How this will work out in terms of actual spending remains to be seen.
To be fair, the University recognises this and has adjusted the admissions process to remedy it.
It was the spin by Tories on the education select committee to distract from the real problems in education which took us down this cut de sac.
I accept Boris is a winner, but unlike Labour when the time comes the conservatives have several candidates to replace Boris
So, for example, a set text was Race Cars, which involved a committee of old white cars changing the rules to prevent a black car racing because they were concerned that he would win the race.
Fortunately there was a young female white car around who eventually overcame her fear of social ostracism and stood up for the black car, overturned the rules and got the white cars thrown off the committee.
I don’t think instilling that narrative is helpful. It creates division rather than unity.
A new line to be constructed from Liverpool to Manchester via the centre of Warrington
A new line to be constructed from Manchester to Leeds via the centre of Bradford
And the immediate thought is that those two items will be for the chop especially the Liverpool bit (the Manchester to Leeds bit is different because that line needs to be improved, the route is already running at capacity and you can justify spending money improving Bradford's connectivity.
Mr Darcy has estates in Derbyshire, one of the centres of the industrial revolution.
I wonder how many coal mines were providing his £10k a year.
In pharmacy, for the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in the numbers of graduates trained. As a result pharmacists became mush less in demand as they were 'two a penny'. Consequence was the locum pay declined, and career prospects became less good.
Its one reason why doctors are still very well paid - we have historically not trained enough, keeping them scarce.
Of course free markets don't fix things instantly - it takes time, but good businesses adapt and thrive.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-report-of-the-commission-on-race-and-ethnic-disparities/employment-fairness-at-work-and-enterprise
The report is a curate's egg, and heavily spun by the editors, but does actually cite considerable evidence of structural racism and class privilege.
But the overwhelming view from the right seems to be that 'critical race theory' is some scary and dangerous thing. As opposed to a valid, but obviously limited way of looking at the world.
Over here we are experiencing a few mild aftershocks, but in the US it's a full blown moral panic.
My own personal experience is that I was never really encouraged to think about what I would like to do at university. My biggest regret in life was not picking the right A-Levels because it was only once I started mixing with posher kids at sixth form college that I realised what I should have picked.
Working class black graduates vs middle class black graduates vs middle class white graduates vs working class white graduates.
Meanwhile in other news
UK vaccines have been going into EU arms! Hurrah. Clever health Clever politics.
It’s how Gibraltar have managed 115% vaccination coverage. Those foreigners frequently crossing the border got the vaccine.
UK shares land border with EU, but Britain First Brexit government not as smart as Gibraltar government.
As for the actual issue - it's a matter now of increasing supply of drivers.
Which means either adding the skill to the shortages list (where the sounds from the Government are now very different to those the industry was hearing last week) and removing other barriers to increases tests and training.
Social realism was not really Austen's thing, but the same is true over most novels until the age of mass literacy.
All change especially of attitude inevitably involves some degree of overshoot. We might be in that time now (and also wrt eg. trans rights). But that will settle back down at which point we will have a more imo appropriate attitude to race, class, sex, etc.
Or that fact that the Napoleonic Wars were going on - which you might have thought would appear in conversation with officers in Militia....
https://twitter.com/mateosfo/status/1409664424000950277 as you want to read the entire thread
(((Matthew Lewis))) has some Shoup for you
@mateosfo
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Jun 29
Last week I was in a thread where someone wondered about heat, human survivability/habitability, and climate change. I've done some technical work on this specific question, so, quick thread on basics, and what to worry about.
Key term to know: The "wet bulb" temperature.
Which basically says if your sweat cannot evaporate you can be killed at 28C / 82F
And if the web-bulb is above 37C, that's definitely not good for your lungs.
Note, though, that parts of British Columbia east of the Cascades are actually desert and some deep valleys do trap heat, so temperatures above 40C are reasonably common, and humidity is not that high, unlike nearer the coast. 49C, though...
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/06/30/dutch-broadcaster-apologises-using-nazi-era-subtitles-german/
Which is why "Fast and the Furious 37" will get a much higher box office than the Ken Loach film released the same week.
If the history of empire was still taught the way my parents were in the 1930s, then that would be astonishingly ignorant.
I still have no idea what possessed my GCSE English teacher to teach it to his all boys class. Something more blood and guts would have got much more of a reaction.
Have we heard from @SeaShantyIrish2 ?
The high wet-bulb temperatures are really deadly because they will kill you even if you act sensibly (drink water, stay in the shade, etc).
HS2 is a set project: to build a new high-speed rail line from London to just north of Birmingham (phase1/1a), and to Manchester/Leeds (phase 2). Much other work needs doing, but it's all directed to that core.
NPR is a set of related and unrelated projects to enhance connectivity and services in the north, including electrification schemes, reducing bottlenecks, and adding new lines. Some of that work is ongoing; others are barely specified, let alone been through planning or funded. NPR is a very different, and in many ways more complex, project.
Unless you regularly clay bar, wax and polish any colour looks like shit.
Hence the extreme popularity of Horrible Histories, which took the idea and ran with it.
Though my large bet on France to win Euro 2020 suggests my forecasting abilities are not what Dominic Cummings would call super.
Austen's access to and interest in detailed accounts of the conflict were, of course, somewhat limited.
(edited 'significant' for 'insignificant'. Which rather changed the tone of the post...)
I've been trying Autoglym Ultra HD Wax, which is very good but to be honest I don't find it any better than Autoglym Extra Gloss Protection (which is cheaper and much easier to apply).
There was a massive genre of novels, books, pamphlets etc about the war in all its forms. She simply wasn't interested in putting any of that in her novels.
Not what I'd expect from the traditional view of those demographics.
However:
- feeding kids during holidays as well represents a massive erosion of the concept of parental responsibility. If you think benefits are not enough then stand up and argue for an increase in benefits
- I really dislike the “why do you want kids to go hungry” line of argument if you oppose extension. It’s manipulative bullshit.
Which the NCB mined right up to the house (including the gardens), 'cos privilege.
The house is being done up but isn't really fully open yet. A big project...
https://wentworthwoodhouse.org.uk/
"White privilege" struggles as a phrase because in British English privilege has a particular meaning. It means "poshness". No amount of explaining can eliminate this. So you tell a WWC person they have white privilege and it jars. "I'm not privileged, I grew up in a council estate". An American term that doesn't translate.
Other recent examples: from the left, "defund the police" which sounds like nonsense in a country where the police service like many others suffers from chronic underfunding. The British English interpretation is let's spend less on policing. From the right, references to "liberals" (British English translation: yellow rosette wearing centrists), "socialised medicine" (what?) and obsession with various "amendments" which have absolutely no meaning here. I would say the terminology of the American left has crept further into British politics than the right, largely because the preoccupations of the latter - abortion, gun rights, imaginary voter fraud - are mainly so completely alien in most of the UK that they are just ignored as exotic.
Perhaps for the good of UK social cohesion we need some British equivalent of the Academie Francaise.
Including this:
The scale of the problem was laid bare in an extraordinary dossier sent in April to the Department for Education by Bryn Harris, chief legal counsel to the Free Speech Union [FSU], which campaigns against cancel culture.
It contained a collection of teaching materials obtained from the concerned parents of children at no fewer than 15 English schools where the FSU alleges that teachers have 'failed to comply with their duties to forbid the promotion of partisan political views and to secure balanced treatment of political issues'.
It would be interesting to see that litigated. FSU have been a bit of a Rottweiler on this particular issue, and had a certain amount of success.
(Rottweiler joke: what has 4 legs and an arm?)
Ireland said no, fuck you very much
You are not wiggling off this hook, a mistake has been made that can’t be unmade when the time has passed.
I've got a great book: "All Things Austen: a concise encyclopaedia of Austen's world", by Kirstin Olsen. A quick flick through it reveals much about dances, education, food, and servants, but little about the army. There are long sections on the 'navy' and 'marines', however. So a failure to mention the war appears to extend to modern times.
Going by this, and from my own extensive professional experience, you are more likely to die from Covid than to find a state school that focuses on white privilege/wokeness/partisan political views.
Perhaps Charles and others who want to avoid the woke stuff should save their money and support their local state schools. Seems to me to be more of a problem in private schools, like ASL (and Eton apparently), than state schools.
Hmmm. Isn't Charles the very definition of white privilege? Multi-generational power and wealth and says no to pennies to feed hungry kids in inner cities.
"This Morning" claiming Astra Zenica not accepted as a vaccine for proving you have been jabbed by USA authorities
Well - that complicates the cruise a tad then ........
It's easier to crush an egg than fight a dragon.
Are you suggesting we should force it down their throat against their wishes?
Or are you suggesting we should fly people from Europe to the UK in order to vaccinate them then fly them back?
PS many people living in the Republic have been vaccinated in Northern Ireland.
The issue in education is class, not race. The monied class don't want to pay anything to bring up the poorest from their low levels of attainment. That the monied are very largely (though not exclusively) white is a side note.
White privilege remains a dumb term.
https://www.uefa.com/uefaeuro-2020/news/026a-12a29a72a4d9-939e8f95a920-1000--euro-2020-rules-on-yellow-cards-and-suspensions-when-are-they-w/
In Austen's world, the Army, Navy and Marines served to provide uniforms for minor gentry to wear to social occasions.
Finding an article in an encyclopaedia of her world containing an article on the benefits of Mr Seppings diagonal bracing method and its application to ships of the line would be a bit weird.