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Italy makes vaccinations compulsory for the over 50s – politicalbetting.com

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  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    How do you square compulsory vaccination for children (going against their parents permission) with different rules for Adults?
    Because we judge that often children do not know what is best for them. Especially when they’re very young.

    Adults are adults.

    Parents permission is irrelevant when the child’s welfare is at stake.
    So many flaws there you've just created a whole years worth of the Moral Maze.
  • QuincelQuincel Posts: 3,949
    Anyone who has had a punt on the Smarkets weekly by-election market may enjoy this article from the local paper. Includes this great line by the Tory candidate:

    "I feel very confident about the election because of my passion and belief in community spirit. Only one person has slammed the door in my face."

    https://www.gedlingeye.co.uk/news/cavendish-by-election-meet-the-candidates-standing-to-win-seat/
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,883

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758
    eek said:

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    My daughters are horrified by the Gandhi statue in Tavistock Square. When they are a bit older, they will be campaigning to have it removed.....
    I'm going to hate the answer (I'm sure everyone here is) but why don't they like Gandhi.

    I suspect it's because he didn't treat everyone equally (as was the way then) but he lived in a different world and big bang approaches don't (or incredibly rarely) work. Everything has to be done in baby steps especially the early days.

    At some point Emily Davison will be being attacked on animal cruelty grounds.
    Was she the one that killed an innocent horse?
  • Good morning

    Just heard a report from Melbourne that Djokovic is claiming he has natural immunity to covid/omicron

    Good luck with that

    Is the natural immunity down to

    - Taking lots of vitamin D
    - Goat de-worming pills
    - Hot broth
    - Jif in the hot broth
    - Taking lots of cold showers and rolling in the dirt to "exercise the immune system"

    Or all of the above?
    Arrogance ?
    Discussing with Mrs. P this morning over a cup of tea in bed that Djokavic says he has a medical exemption and what condition that might be - she suggested he suffers from uphimselfitis.
    Now that did make me chuckle
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670
    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    You can stop manipulation but you can't stop faulty data entry. In fact it makes faulty data entry worse.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

    https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/03/1447239/opensea-freezes-22m-of-stolen-bored-apes
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    "Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions."

    So essentially your argument is that slavery is not wrong, it's only if it is practiced by Christians that it is. SO, totally fine for Muslims, Hindus etc to do it?

    In that case then, I assume you also think it is not wrong for gay people to be killed in the Middle East because, eh, they are Muslim and they have a different way of doing things.

    Ps getting all Godwin. The Nazis weren't Christian either, they were essentially Pagans. Guess we have to revisit what they did in the light of their beliefs.
    I cannot believe anyone is stupid enough to read what I said as implying that.
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No - it’s a point of principle. The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment. And you are excluding people from normal life when they have committed no crime.
  • I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
    By not being vaccinated you are. These people could be killers
    "These people could be killers".

    Good lord - I'm off out to calm down.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901
    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    Adding opaque technology that no one sensible understands is unlikely to help. The idea that blockchain cannot be implemented badly or otherwise manipulated -maybe in non technological ways by a bad actor - is somewhat optimistic.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,624
    MrEd said:

    Cookie said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    Interesting point.
    For most of history, slaves have been of the same race as slave owners, for obvious reasons - those of different races were too far away.
    But the slavery we are most familiar with was made easier for contemporaries to justify by its victims being of a different race - easier to view as 'not really human'. That said, IIRC, the main taboo was on Christians enslaving non-Christians - so perhaps being of a different religion was more important (and a 'primitive' religion too - other monotheists were afforded rather more respect).

    A nuance which is seldom discussed is that my understanding is that the British did little or no capturing of Africans for slavery - they were bought from other Africans (presumably losers in local wars?) That makes the British part in it only mildly less abhorrent, yes - but the role of how the slaves were enslaved in the first place is rarely discussed (and I certainly don't have any sort of handle on it).
    Correct. But, as Ishmael has just demonstrated, you get people who think that's ok for Africans to enslave others because they are not Christians and / or "of another culture". If that is your outlook on things, then you should throw away the rule book of Universal Rights, stop hectoring other nations such as China on violations, and accept that each set of people have the right to do their own thing, including chucking gays to their deaths from tall buildings and stoning women to death.
    According to a number of people from the er.. modern?... viewpoint, that is indeed so. The sins of non-white non-europeans are less, because they are oppressed*

    *Even if not currently oppressed, they are oppressed by history. So Xi is oppressed by the history of British colonialism....
  • I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
    How many of the 50% of ICU admissions are the clinically vulnerable who can't take the jab?

    I have no idea, but presumably they are by definition the likely users of ICU in normal non covid times. Would be good to have an understanding if it is 5%, 10% or 20% or whatever.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,087
    Quincel said:

    Anyone who has had a punt on the Smarkets weekly by-election market may enjoy this article from the local paper. Includes this great line by the Tory candidate:

    "I feel very confident about the election because of my passion and belief in community spirit. Only one person has slammed the door in my face."

    https://www.gedlingeye.co.uk/news/cavendish-by-election-meet-the-candidates-standing-to-win-seat/

    Quite fun article.

    Darren Maltby is a blast from the past.
  • Charles said:

    Charles said:

    We were talking the other day about Don't Look Up and @Leon was saying that in his opinion the latter half of the film is spoiled by portraying Trump supporters as morons. Well according to the latest poll shows that nearly half of Americans don't think Biden won the election https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory

    I'm not saying they are stupid as was suggested. They are being gaslit on an epic scale by their media. But Biden DID win the election. Massively. Fairly. Demonstrably. That they still don't believe it is bonkers.

    So I think the film got it pitch perfect. Here is something undeniably true. Just look at it. No, its a fake, don't look at it.

    57% of Americans think a repeat attempted coup is likely to occur again. Perhaps the Canadian professor was right and the land of the Maple leaf needs to start preparing for refugees fleeing Gilead...

    Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.
    I know that I am happily quoting pop culture by warning of Gilead. And the book was written in the 80s so its not contemporary. But the notion of it IS absolutely bang up to date. That new Texas law allowing men to shop womenfolk for cash for their crimes of seeking an abortion is straight out of Gilead.

    We know that a significant number of Americans have been persuaded to Don't Look Up, that there was no coup, that the election was stolen. If they can be manipulated to believe things they witnessed to have not happened then they can be manipulated to believe anything.

    There isn't an obvious USA/CSA border split this time is there?
    North East plus the lakes (including Chicago, Minnesota, etc) is one country

    Pacific North West and NorCal is another

    The rest is a third
    I assume that we are trying to create a blue America and a red America. I never made it up to Portland and Seattle - are you putting them into the red camp? Would have thought (with no real world experience admittedly) that places like Seattle were blue. I would expect that most of the flyover and mountain states would be red as well.

    Not sure how California (or are you just saying SF downwards?) would cope on its own as the only blue outpost west of Illinois.
    Yes responding to the question on natural division between USA/CSA

    Washing & Oregon plus California coast down to LA would be in the “pacific north west” country. Rather than a Pakistan/East Pakistan structure seemed simpler to separate from day 1.

    SoCal is fairly red - Long Beach down to San Diego and across the Inland Empire to Arizona and NM.

    Thanks - interesting. I had a brilliant time as a travelling student hanging out with surfer dudes in San Diego on Mission Beach. I accept that may not have been indicative of the political views of the city or the area :wink:
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Getting a jury to find you not guilty would be harder unless you could show strong evidence that the majority of the city supported your actions. If we have jury trials that is part of the process. Lay jurors will inevitably give consideration as to whether an action is wrong as well as illegal. If it is not both they often acquit. That doesn't seem like a particular flaw in the system, generally it is a positive feature against bad law and state overreach.

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Getting a jury to find you not guilty would be harder unless you could show strong evidence that the majority of the city supported your actions. If we have jury trials that is part of the process. Lay jurors will inevitably give consideration as to whether an action is wrong as well as illegal. If it is not both they often acquit. That doesn't seem like a particular flaw in the system, generally it is a positive feature against bad law and state overreach.
    Ha, yes - and agree with your last sentence. I'm content with the legal process. My issue is with the argument that you can unilaterally declare that a statue should be removed when there is already a (cumbersome and slow) process for doing such things.
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950
    edited January 2022

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.

    But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.

    Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    Charles said:

    Charles said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    Respectfully, that is nonsense. The people who have no confidence in Britain are the ones who think the country will collapse if we examine and criticise aspects of its past behaviour. The fact is that we achieved great wealth in large part via enthusiastic participation in a huge crime (getting rich by forcing others to work for free on pain of death is fairly parasitic I think you would agree).
    I don't think that the chief architects of that crime should continue to be honoured, especially as our future as a country rests on every one of its citizens, including millions of descendents of slaves, feeling like they have a stake in it. In my opinion it is the statue shaggers who lack any coherent vision of the future - they want us to worship the past without understanding it, and celebrate who we were not who we are or who we could become.
    The issue is that the statute destroyers went outside the democratic process. It had been discussed. The local population (IIRC) was divided but wanted to retain it. There was a compromise of a detailed plaque although the wording was challenging to reach a consensus on.

    And then a group of people decided that the democratic process wasn’t important.

    (As an aside, the way they have left it damaged and on its side in a museum is an interesting and thoughtful response.)
    That's a very partial reading of the situation. The Colston culters were essentially blocking any plaque with an accurate account of what Colston had done, preventing a resolution of the issue for years. I would have preferred to see the issue resolved in a different way, but I think the eventual outcome - Colston in a museum, lying in his back with BLM written across his chest in red letters, is the ideal one. And the fact that he was thrown into the waters of one of Britain's largest slave ports along the way isn't something I'm going to get too upset about. I am much more concerned about violence against people than against inanimate objects - having a heavier sentence for damaging a statue than for rape, for instance, is insane.
    The wording posted here last night which had apparently been proposed by the merchant venturers did t seem unreasonable to me. It highlighted his role in the RAC, the number of slaves, etc.
    On the other hand it did seem unreasonable to the democratically elected head of Bristol Council, whose views I would venture were perhaps more pertinent. What did the Colston cutlers object to in the original wording, do you know?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,711

    MrEd said:

    Cookie said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    Interesting point.
    For most of history, slaves have been of the same race as slave owners, for obvious reasons - those of different races were too far away.
    But the slavery we are most familiar with was made easier for contemporaries to justify by its victims being of a different race - easier to view as 'not really human'. That said, IIRC, the main taboo was on Christians enslaving non-Christians - so perhaps being of a different religion was more important (and a 'primitive' religion too - other monotheists were afforded rather more respect).

    A nuance which is seldom discussed is that my understanding is that the British did little or no capturing of Africans for slavery - they were bought from other Africans (presumably losers in local wars?) That makes the British part in it only mildly less abhorrent, yes - but the role of how the slaves were enslaved in the first place is rarely discussed (and I certainly don't have any sort of handle on it).
    Correct. But, as Ishmael has just demonstrated, you get people who think that's ok for Africans to enslave others because they are not Christians and / or "of another culture". If that is your outlook on things, then you should throw away the rule book of Universal Rights, stop hectoring other nations such as China on violations, and accept that each set of people have the right to do their own thing, including chucking gays to their deaths from tall buildings and stoning women to death.
    According to a number of people from the er.. modern?... viewpoint, that is indeed so. The sins of non-white non-europeans are less, because they are oppressed*

    *Even if not currently oppressed, they are oppressed by history. So Xi is oppressed by the history of British colonialism....
    Apart from Hong Kong vast majority of China was never a British colony or indeed a colony of any European power. In fact the Japanese controlled more of China in the 1930s and early 1940s than any European power ever did.

    Xi is just a Maoist dictator effectively
  • IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 15,545
    On principle, I believe people have the absolute right to determine what goes into their bodies. So no mandatory vaccination and no effective punishment for not agreeing. Nevertheless choices have consequences and as long as you pose a real and substantial infection risk you will be isolated, while other people can go about their normal lives. Think there should be two things done here:

    Hold outs should be supported / strongly encouraged to vaccinate. We don't want to punish them; we want them to vaccinate.

    No access to public enclosed spaces without a monitored PCR test / passport in the past week and a demonstrable* LFT in the past 8 hours. This requirement might be loosened when/if the risk abates.

    * Some sort of monitoring without overburdening the bureaucracy.
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    "Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions."

    So essentially your argument is that slavery is not wrong, it's only if it is practiced by Christians that it is. SO, totally fine for Muslims, Hindus etc to do it?

    In that case then, I assume you also think it is not wrong for gay people to be killed in the Middle East because, eh, they are Muslim and they have a different way of doing things.

    Ps getting all Godwin. The Nazis weren't Christian either, they were essentially Pagans. Guess we have to revisit what they did in the light of their beliefs.
    You have completely taken what @IshmaelZ said out of context. How about answering taking the whole post and not a selected part. We also focus on our role, because it is our role. You seem to be using the old trick of everyone else is bad so let's ignore what we did wrong.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

    https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/03/1447239/opensea-freezes-22m-of-stolen-bored-apes
    Oh I'm ignoring that whole Opensea Ape story - it's being going on now for over a week because people just don't understand how to perform the tasks required to 100% secure their assets. (Opensea raised $300m this week on a $3.3bn valuation btw).

    What's funny is that the people who are being stolen from are clever people, it's just that this stuff is so hard to get right incredibly few people can do it.
  • Cookie said:

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Getting a jury to find you not guilty would be harder unless you could show strong evidence that the majority of the city supported your actions. If we have jury trials that is part of the process. Lay jurors will inevitably give consideration as to whether an action is wrong as well as illegal. If it is not both they often acquit. That doesn't seem like a particular flaw in the system, generally it is a positive feature against bad law and state overreach.

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Getting a jury to find you not guilty would be harder unless you could show strong evidence that the majority of the city supported your actions. If we have jury trials that is part of the process. Lay jurors will inevitably give consideration as to whether an action is wrong as well as illegal. If it is not both they often acquit. That doesn't seem like a particular flaw in the system, generally it is a positive feature against bad law and state overreach.
    Ha, yes - and agree with your last sentence. I'm content with the legal process. My issue is with the argument that you can unilaterally declare that a statue should be removed when there is already a (cumbersome and slow) process for doing such things.
    You can try. A jury will judge. Seems fine.

    As an aside not sure unilateral is a balanced description of something involving thousands of residents and polling suggesting majority approval.
  • TOPPING said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.

    But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.

    Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
    Yep, for clarification I am not in support of mandating vaccinations to the general public. But Gallowgate said very clearly that he didn't agree "with mandatory vaccination for adults at all." I was wondering how far this extended. I do think that those working in certain professions with vulnerable people should have to get vaccinated as a condition of employment. That applies to both NHS workers and Care Home staff.
  • turbotubbsturbotubbs Posts: 14,883

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
    How many of the 50% of ICU admissions are the clinically vulnerable who can't take the jab?

    I have no idea, but presumably they are by definition the likely users of ICU in normal non covid times. Would be good to have an understanding if it is 5%, 10% or 20% or whatever.
    Not many - see reports passim from ICU staff etc. Lots of 30 and 40 year olds who thought they would just shake it off. I have no beef with people who cannot take the vaccine, its those who can, but won't, for whatever the reason.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    I don’t disagree with it, but that’s very different to the state mandating it for all.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Presumably you don't have the energy to remove that particular statue.
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
    Charles said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No - it’s a point of principle. The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment. And you are excluding people from normal life when they have committed no crime.
    Like smokers?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
    How many of the 50% of ICU admissions are the clinically vulnerable who can't take the jab?

    I have no idea, but presumably they are by definition the likely users of ICU in normal non covid times. Would be good to have an understanding if it is 5%, 10% or 20% or whatever.
    I'd have a bet on less than 5%.

    "Can't" quickly gets switched to "really really opposed" by the refuseniks.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    eek said:

    eek said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    How do you square compulsory vaccination for children (going against their parents permission) with different rules for Adults?
    Because we judge that often children do not know what is best for them. Especially when they’re very young.

    Adults are adults.

    Parents permission is irrelevant when the child’s welfare is at stake.
    So many flaws there you've just created a whole years worth of the Moral Maze.
    I don’t agree funnily enough
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
    By not being vaccinated you are. These people could be killers
    That's not true. Vaccines help the individual avoid severe symptoms. The collective responsibility is to reduce the risk to the NHS, not to stop someone else from getting it.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    eek said:

    eek said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    How do you square compulsory vaccination for children (going against their parents permission) with different rules for Adults?
    Because we judge that often children do not know what is best for them. Especially when they’re very young.

    Adults are adults.

    Parents permission is irrelevant when the child’s welfare is at stake.
    So many flaws there you've just created a whole years worth of the Moral Maze.
    I don’t agree funnily enough
    I think non compulsion for adults and compulsory for children outwith parental permission is going to be a err... niche position :)
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,711
    edited January 2022
    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa.

    In fact a number of white Christians were enslaved by Barbary Corsairs
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

    https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/03/1447239/opensea-freezes-22m-of-stolen-bored-apes
    Oh I'm ignoring that whole Opensea Ape story - it's being going on now for over a week because people just don't understand how to perform the tasks required to 100% secure their assets. (Opensea raised $300m this week on a $3.3bn valuation btw).

    What's funny is that the people who are being stolen from are clever people, it's just that this stuff is so hard to get right incredibly few people can do it.
    LOL, Opensea being worth $3.5bn, is nearly as bad as Coinbase being worth $56bn - more than LSE and NYSE combined!
  • TOPPINGTOPPING Posts: 40,950

    TOPPING said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.

    But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.

    Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
    Yep, for clarification I am not in support of mandating vaccinations to the general public. But Gallowgate said very clearly that he didn't agree "with mandatory vaccination for adults at all." I was wondering how far this extended. I do think that those working in certain professions with vulnerable people should have to get vaccinated as a condition of employment. That applies to both NHS workers and Care Home staff.
    Yes true ah I see.

    And yes, except at some point the disadvantages of having fewer eg care home staff will outweigh the risks of having them unvaxxed.

    ISTR that we are getting fairly ok Omicron care home stats aren't we.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    MattW said:

    Quincel said:

    Anyone who has had a punt on the Smarkets weekly by-election market may enjoy this article from the local paper. Includes this great line by the Tory candidate:

    "I feel very confident about the election because of my passion and belief in community spirit. Only one person has slammed the door in my face."

    https://www.gedlingeye.co.uk/news/cavendish-by-election-meet-the-candidates-standing-to-win-seat/

    Quite fun article.

    Darren Maltby is a blast from the past.
    That line-up is quite interesting: all white, male and late middle-aged, by the looks of them.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
  • BenpointerBenpointer Posts: 31,281
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257
    edited January 2022
    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    It's a valid point. But on the final question, well I'd probably just get vaccinated again. Likely less hassle than getting the records fixed :wink:

    (As I've mentioned before, I once had five vaccinations in one session before a field trip to Chile due to my childhood GP beingunable to provide records of my previous vaccinations. I'm sure they could have been retrieved with sufficient effort - or my parents may have had records somewhere - but it was easier just to have the jabs again.)

    As for some others on here, e.g. Gallowgate, Charles, I'm against mandatory vaccination. I could accept a limited lockdown that only applied to the unvaccinated if I was convinced that a lockdown of some kind was essential (e.g. choices are lock down everyone or lock down the unvaccinated). Partly philosophical, but also practical - I we have relatively little antivax sentiment in this country and I think that rests partly on vaccination by consent. We're given information that we trust, generally, and are trusted to make our own decisions. I think we'd see more opposition if there was coercion.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    TOPPING said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    Then get a different job. Private company = no problem. Of course we have seen that the state has mandated vaccines for NHS staff and care workers so we are at the top of the slope.

    But we are talking about normal life here. Hairdressers, by all that is holy.

    Plus everyone seems to have Covid right now. This is not all coming from the unvaccinated and hence until there is more and conclusive evidence about whether the vaxxed can or cannot pass it on then to legislate for vaccinations is building a Maginot Line.
    Yep, for clarification I am not in support of mandating vaccinations to the general public. But Gallowgate said very clearly that he didn't agree "with mandatory vaccination for adults at all." I was wondering how far this extended. I do think that those working in certain professions with vulnerable people should have to get vaccinated as a condition of employment. That applies to both NHS workers and Care Home staff.
    The issue is at what point you pull the line.

    What about none front line care home staff. Suppliers to care homes...

    You quickly get to a point especially when it's important rather than a minor irritant where it becomes everyone.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    MaxPB said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
    By not being vaccinated you are. These people could be killers
    That's not true. Vaccines help the individual avoid severe symptoms. The collective responsibility is to reduce the risk to the NHS, not to stop someone else from getting it.
    Mike's sort of correct, the unvaxxed being potential killers to themselves.
  • kamski said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    Some examples of people who "want to forget about the Barbary Trade" etc?

    It's an interesting discussion. Where I live (Cologne) within a few metres of my door I walk over a Stolperstein
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
    small brass plaques set in the pavement that just say "here lived" with a name an eand a date. There are loads of them around the city, they started in Cologne in 1992 and have spread across Germany and beyond. I think they are a good way of remembering victims of Nazism, a lot of the time I don't notice them (any more) as I walk around the neighbourhood, the city, but every now and then I see them and stop and catch my breath.

    The AfD and others really don't like them, and they use similar arguments - we should be proud of the many good things in German history, we shouldn't feel guilty about what previous generations did, what about all the other terrible things that other people did, Germany should be confident and not crippled with guilt, the people putting these plaques there are unpatriotic anti-German etc etc.
    The concept of the Stolperstein is a great thing, On my first visit to Berlin I became slightly obsessed with spotting them - 13 outside a single apartment bock in Charlottenburg!
    Of course the UK has no equivalent of the AfD, people with selective memories who wish to turn historical sins into virtues.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,624
    Pulpstar said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
    How many of the 50% of ICU admissions are the clinically vulnerable who can't take the jab?

    I have no idea, but presumably they are by definition the likely users of ICU in normal non covid times. Would be good to have an understanding if it is 5%, 10% or 20% or whatever.
    I'd have a bet on less than 5%.

    "Can't" quickly gets switched to "really really opposed" by the refuseniks.
    The actual number of those who are medically unable to take the vaccine is quite small. It has shrunk over time, as more information about the effector vaccines on various conditions has become understood - initially there was a lot of caution, naturally.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    MaxPB said:

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
    By not being vaccinated you are. These people could be killers
    That's not true. Vaccines help the individual avoid severe symptoms. The collective responsibility is to reduce the risk to the NHS, not to stop someone else from getting it.
    Another point is that the more people vaccinate, the shorter the pandemic likely is. Getting vaccinated won't stop you getting it but immunity after vaccination AND infection is much superior to immunity after simple infection.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257

    MattW said:

    Quincel said:

    Anyone who has had a punt on the Smarkets weekly by-election market may enjoy this article from the local paper. Includes this great line by the Tory candidate:

    "I feel very confident about the election because of my passion and belief in community spirit. Only one person has slammed the door in my face."

    https://www.gedlingeye.co.uk/news/cavendish-by-election-meet-the-candidates-standing-to-win-seat/

    Quite fun article.

    Darren Maltby is a blast from the past.
    That line-up is quite interesting: all white, male and late middle-aged, by the looks of them.
    Doesn't sound all that interesting to me :wink:
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited January 2022

    Pulpstar said:

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So with most (i.e. over 50%) of admissions to ICU for covid being unvaccinated people, at a time when over 90% of people eligible ARE vaccinated, you should be able to understand the anger. If they had all taken the free, easy to obtain, vaccine, then the pressure on ICU would be halved right now. Hows that for helping the NHS?
    Happily in England the government have managed to resist imposing conditions on peoples freedom beyond mask wearing (annoying, but not life limiting) and advising WFH, but in Scotland, Wales and NI there are significant restrictions. How mean spirited is Drakeford to BAN park runs? FFS. This could have been avoided if selfish people had done their duty by their fellow citizens.

    I know some don't agree but society as a whole should not have restrictions it should be targetted at the ones causing over 50% of ICU admissions RIGHT NOW.
    How many of the 50% of ICU admissions are the clinically vulnerable who can't take the jab?

    I have no idea, but presumably they are by definition the likely users of ICU in normal non covid times. Would be good to have an understanding if it is 5%, 10% or 20% or whatever.
    I'd have a bet on less than 5%.

    "Can't" quickly gets switched to "really really opposed" by the refuseniks.
    The actual number of those who are medically unable to take the vaccine is quite small. It has shrunk over time, as more information about the effector vaccines on various conditions has become understood - initially there was a lot of caution, naturally.
    Pregnant women was the biggest group initially I think. Was glad when advice on that changed.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
  • MrEd said:

    Dura_Ace said:



    Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.

    Jan 6 was the start not the end and these people who think everything will be alright if Trump just has an actuarially unlikely heart attack are deluding themselves. He was just a moronic fucking boomer who stumbled on to something by accident.

    The number one foreign policy goal of the British government should be to build strategic independence from the US against the day of its very ugly and chaotic disintegration.
    15% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans would be happy if there was significant loss of life amongst the other side. Not much difference.

    Yet, this is presented as a one-sided issue. Guess what? The Democrats try to steal elections. It might not be a raging mob outside the Capitol but they use their soft power equivalent, which is the media telling us for years post-2016 that Trump was an illegitimate President and a Russian spy, and with Hillary saying even before 2020 that the election was stolen from her. Oh, and don't fucking mention Stacey Abrams who also gets away with still claiming she won the Georgia Governor election.

    If you want to genuinely solve the problem, instead of virtual signalling, then you can start by recognising this is a two sided problem, not just one.

    Isn't a really crucial difference that Trump is very obviously part of the 20%, while Biden is equally obviously NOT part of the 15%? Indeed, Trump gave tacit support to a mob that wanted to hang his own VP for not being Trumpian enough, let alone Democrats.

    Agree that all sides have extremists. But whereas in the Democrat Asylum, the lunatics are fairly safely locked in their padded cells, in the Republican Asylum, they are quite clearly in the manager's office, and dishing out the medication.

    I also think characterising dubious campaign messages with "stealing" an election is utterly bogus - elections since the dawn of democracy have involved propoganda. That is in no way equivalent to a mob breaking into the legislature brandishing nooses.

    Further, whilst the 2016 election was controversial (and clearly Clinton was unfortunate to win the popular vote but lose the election) you are totally misreporting her response. She attended Trump's inaugeration and - through gritted teeth no doubt - conceded and wished him well. She's hardly a model of the graceful loser, but it is simply untrue on your part to suggest that there isn't a vast gulf between her approach in 2016 and Trump's in 2020.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,624

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Presumably you don't have the energy to remove that particular statue.
    In time, it should be replaced by a statue of Watt...
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".

    What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257
    Selebian said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    It's a valid point. But on the final question, well I'd probably just get vaccinated again. Likely less hassle than getting the records fixed :wink:

    (As I've mentioned before, I once had five vaccinations in one session before a field trip to Chile due to my childhood GP beingunable to provide records of my previous vaccinations. I'm sure they could have been retrieved with sufficient effort - or my parents may have had records somewhere - but it was easier just to have the jabs again.)

    As for some others on here, e.g. Gallowgate, Charles, I'm against mandatory vaccination. I could accept a limited lockdown that only applied to the unvaccinated if I was convinced that a lockdown of some kind was essential (e.g. choices are lock down everyone or lock down the unvaccinated). Partly philosophical, but also practical - I we have relatively little antivax sentiment in this country and I think that rests partly on vaccination by consent. We're given information that we trust, generally, and are trusted to make our own decisions. I think we'd see more opposition if there was coercion.
    On government records, I have a colleague who was trying to go on holiday over Christmas (abroad) with her two children, one 12, the other younger. Destination country required vaccine passport with double vax status for anyone 12 or older. Most 12 year olds not double vaxxed, but hers was due to her having an underlying health condition (she's triple vaxxed and will get or may now have had an additional booster). So, in principle all fine. But the NHS passport app is not available to anyone under 13 (and here, linked to your records, you obviously can't lie about your age). She phoned the NHS helpline multiple times and they had no option to generate/send a paper vaccine passport for anyone under 13 either. I don't think she ever got it resolved so probably had to cancel the trip.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172
    edited January 2022
    All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.

    Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.

    What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.

    All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.

    You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.

    Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.

    Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    kamski said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    Some examples of people who "want to forget about the Barbary Trade" etc?

    It's an interesting discussion. Where I live (Cologne) within a few metres of my door I walk over a Stolperstein
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
    small brass plaques set in the pavement that just say "here lived" with a name an eand a date. There are loads of them around the city, they started in Cologne in 1992 and have spread across Germany and beyond. I think they are a good way of remembering victims of Nazism, a lot of the time I don't notice them (any more) as I walk around the neighbourhood, the city, but every now and then I see them and stop and catch my breath.

    The AfD and others really don't like them, and they use similar arguments - we should be proud of the many good things in German history, we shouldn't feel guilty about what previous generations did, what about all the other terrible things that other people did, Germany should be confident and not crippled with guilt, the people putting these plaques there are unpatriotic anti-German etc etc.
    The concept of the Stolperstein is a great thing, On my first visit to Berlin I became slightly obsessed with spotting them - 13 outside a single apartment bock in Charlottenburg!
    Of course the UK has no equivalent of the AfD, people with selective memories who wish to turn historical sins into virtues.
    That's because we aren't really documenting the sins in public yet so the debate isn't about turning historical sins into virtues - it's more we want to keep people ignorant rather than inform.



  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912

    Cookie said:

    Heathener said:

    DavidL said:

    Carnyx said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    What was one of the interesting things about that discussion of the Colston statue last night was the argument that it was an active act of denial of history in order to titivate Colston's image ('whitewash' would be an unfortunate but perhaps apt expression). The late C19 erectors would certainly qualify as "people who continually do [history] down and seek to relitigate historic sins". As, for example, were the moral warriors of the C19 who tried to prevent Burns's statues on the grounds of his infidelity and immorality. Statue wars are nothing new, and anyone who tries to set history in aspic, or rather in marble and bronze, is in denial of history.
    Whilst I agree with most of that throwing a public statue into the harbour is still criminal damage and not the way to resolve these issues. The jury was wrong and the senior counsel representing the accused was dangerously irresponsible. The rule of law is important and is of particular importance in the protection of the vulnerable and exploited in our society.
    People have a right to decide who should be venerated in their home town. A slave trader isn't one of them.

    I also note the sheer hypocrisy of those getting agitated about this verdict who were all-too-happy to throw their support behind those who overthrew Ceaucescu or the protestors in Tiannamen Square.

    Libertarians love the overthrow of oppression until it comes to their turn.
    Your first sentence is exactly right. But that's people as a whole. If the majority of the city wants rid of a statue, it will be removed. Local democracy is slow and imperfect, but it works. Four hothead can't be allowed to unilaterally decide they represent a city's opinion, even if on this particular subject, they do.
    Getting the right result by means of the wrong process is the wrong result. Process is important.
    There is a statue in my home town of James Prescott Joule. If I decided I didn't like physics, what's to stop me pulling it down with the argument 'people have a right to decide who ought to be venerated in their home town'?
    Presumably you don't have the energy to remove that particular statue.
    In time, it should be replaced by a statue of Watt...
    Enough of this Wattaboutery!
  • LostPasswordLostPassword Posts: 14,772
    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    That's a really important point in general. It's why I'd favour the additional tax/recusancy fine approach, rather than restrictions as such, as you can then claim the money back once you've proved your status, but you don't face a situation of being sacked in the interim (as has happened with people who have fallen foul of immigration law in a similar respect).

    However, in this specific scenario, I'd simply take another three doses of the vaccine. It would only be if my records were still not correctly updated that I'd have a real problem (probably because of a duplicate record, and/or a malformed foreign key).

    I know GDPR gives purple the right to have their data corrected, but I don't know how well that part of the law is operating.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,711
    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    There were 4 million black slaves in North America but from 11 to 15 million black slaves held by Arabs over the centuries, plus around 1 million white slaves enslaved by the likes of the Barbary corsairs
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.

    Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    Refusal to be vaccinated is a mental illness - job done.

    Just need to work out how you keep your refusal on animal cruelty grounds (which while I think is utterly insane, at least has some logical sanity to it).
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653

    All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.

    Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.

    What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.

    All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.

    You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.

    Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.

    Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).

    Well argued
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072

    All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.

    Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.

    What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.

    All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.

    You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.

    Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.

    Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).

    Jesus christ. Talk about imposing your will upon others.
  • Dura_Ace said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:



    Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.

    Jan 6 was the start not the end and these people who think everything will be alright if Trump just has an actuarially unlikely heart attack are deluding themselves. He was just a moronic fucking boomer who stumbled on to something by accident.

    The number one foreign policy goal of the British government should be to build strategic independence from the US against the day of its very ugly and chaotic disintegration.
    What about the F-35 support, maintenance and software?
    The Israelis operate their F-35 Adirs outside the ALIS/ODIN system and they are going to need all the friends they can get.

    F135 engine maintenance and test is in the Netherlands and MRO&U is done in Italy.
    The Iranians kept their F-14's flying for decades in the face of US sanctions. Although the F-14's are now rather long in the tooth, even with the limited upgrades they have done, they are better than nothing. And non-US countries have much larger technology and engineering capabilities than Iran, and have been intimately involved with the development of the F-35.
    Certain aspects of its performance are yet to be bettered - it would pull 7G at M2.0!

    We had a special (and very rigorous) procedure of disposing of end of life LRUs in the F-14 fleet just in case they mysteriously ended up at Bushehr
    Haven’t Indian Mig-21s proved superior to more modern aircraft in some exercises?
  • CharlesCharles Posts: 35,758

    I’m with @Charles on this. I don’t agree with mandatory vaccination for adults at all. Such a slippery slope. People seem to be unable to be rational and are acting out of blind fear.

    Compulsory vaccination for children, sure, but not adults. The state shouldn’t be mandating what adults inject into their bodies.

    So for many years it has been a condition of employment with many UK health trusts that front line workers in contact with patients must be vaccinated against a variety of diseases. People can lose their jobs if they refuse to be vaccinated. This is nothing new. Do you agree with that?
    No, because they can get a different job
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.

    Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
    Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To @Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

    https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/03/1447239/opensea-freezes-22m-of-stolen-bored-apes
    Oh I'm ignoring that whole Opensea Ape story - it's being going on now for over a week because people just don't understand how to perform the tasks required to 100% secure their assets. (Opensea raised $300m this week on a $3.3bn valuation btw).

    What's funny is that the people who are being stolen from are clever people, it's just that this stuff is so hard to get right incredibly few people can do it.
    LOL, Opensea being worth $3.5bn, is nearly as bad as Coinbase being worth $56bn - more than LSE and NYSE combined!
    Even that's nothing - just wait until people look behind the curtain at Tether ($80bn) and discover what is actually there...

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,624

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
    Indeed.

    But you could then argue that if the Africans had said that they couldn't in conscience sell the slaves, then the slave trade would have been limited, which in turn would have limited the money and power the trade created which created the feedback loop which caused it to grow.

    Almost as if it was complex issue.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
    Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.

    Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
    Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
    Small pox didn't appear in December 2019 from nowhere. It was around for centuries prior to the vaccine becoming available which meant that when outbreaks occurred the number of people it could effect was small (everyone else had antibodies from the previous outbreak x years earlier).

    So your argument is fine for old diseases, it falls completely apart for new ones. You just haven't seen the flaws yet.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    How many BLM protests are there outside the Mauretanian embassy ?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    edited January 2022
    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
    Not many statues of Herr Hitler either.

    But neither H. Hitler nor, in their day, the Algerines or Sallees were considered English, Scottish or Irish heroes.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited January 2022
    Selebian said:

    Selebian said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    It's a valid point. But on the final question, well I'd probably just get vaccinated again. Likely less hassle than getting the records fixed :wink:

    (As I've mentioned before, I once had five vaccinations in one session before a field trip to Chile due to my childhood GP beingunable to provide records of my previous vaccinations. I'm sure they could have been retrieved with sufficient effort - or my parents may have had records somewhere - but it was easier just to have the jabs again.)

    As for some others on here, e.g. Gallowgate, Charles, I'm against mandatory vaccination. I could accept a limited lockdown that only applied to the unvaccinated if I was convinced that a lockdown of some kind was essential (e.g. choices are lock down everyone or lock down the unvaccinated). Partly philosophical, but also practical - I we have relatively little antivax sentiment in this country and I think that rests partly on vaccination by consent. We're given information that we trust, generally, and are trusted to make our own decisions. I think we'd see more opposition if there was coercion.
    On government records, I have a colleague who was trying to go on holiday over Christmas (abroad) with her two children, one 12, the other younger. Destination country required vaccine passport with double vax status for anyone 12 or older. Most 12 year olds not double vaxxed, but hers was due to her having an underlying health condition (she's triple vaxxed and will get or may now have had an additional booster). So, in principle all fine. But the NHS passport app is not available to anyone under 13 (and here, linked to your records, you obviously can't lie about your age). She phoned the NHS helpline multiple times and they had no option to generate/send a paper vaccine passport for anyone under 13 either. I don't think she ever got it resolved so probably had to cancel the trip.
    That's 3 or 4 different things intersecting in interesting ways.

    The under 13 issue is interesting though - that feels like US minor laws coming into the UK via stealth (or rather people just assuming what happens on the internet is done because of laws here rather than laws elsewhere + laziness / habit).
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575

    Stocky said:

    Stocky said:



    I assume you are joking when you suggest that people are walking into restaurants and cinemas cheerfully infecting people. The seek to blame is very regrettable IMO. Infection isn't imprinted with details of the particular person you get the virus from and there is no nefarious intent here in any case.

    The foe is the virus not its particular host.

    The narrative that has developed is that vaccinated people are safe and unvaccinated are a danger. It is conveniently being forgotten that vaccinated people transmit too. Not sure what the latest science is on the relative transmissibility of the two groups.

    The future we should be aiming for - fast - is one where we rub shoulders with everyone again, without firstly seeking to establish, demonise and avoid people for making a legal choice.

    My understanding is that people who are vaccinated and boosted have a lower risk of catching the infection (even asymptomatically) and therefore a lower risk of passing it on. If that wasn't true, then I agree it would change the position and restrictions on anti-vaxxers would be unfair.

    Otherwise, it should not be legal during a pandemic to refuse to protect yourself and simultaneously demand the right to infect others by entering crowded facilities. It's ultimate cakeism.
    No one is demanding the right to infect others. Seriously?
    By not being vaccinated you are. These people could killers
    Vaccines don’t stop infection.
    Why some vaccines stop transmission & others don’t:
    Vaccines that stop transmission are often against viruses that replicate internally first and only then transmit (like measles). So if the vaccine stops internal replication, it stops transmission....

    https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab/status/1464703819061895175
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    edited January 2022

    Dura_Ace said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:



    Time is running out for America. I see no sign of any acceptance of the urgency of the situation. Plenty of op-eds in NY Times warning about 2024, but nothing seems to happen.

    Jan 6 was the start not the end and these people who think everything will be alright if Trump just has an actuarially unlikely heart attack are deluding themselves. He was just a moronic fucking boomer who stumbled on to something by accident.

    The number one foreign policy goal of the British government should be to build strategic independence from the US against the day of its very ugly and chaotic disintegration.
    What about the F-35 support, maintenance and software?
    The Israelis operate their F-35 Adirs outside the ALIS/ODIN system and they are going to need all the friends they can get.

    F135 engine maintenance and test is in the Netherlands and MRO&U is done in Italy.
    The Iranians kept their F-14's flying for decades in the face of US sanctions. Although the F-14's are now rather long in the tooth, even with the limited upgrades they have done, they are better than nothing. And non-US countries have much larger technology and engineering capabilities than Iran, and have been intimately involved with the development of the F-35.
    Certain aspects of its performance are yet to be bettered - it would pull 7G at M2.0!

    We had a special (and very rigorous) procedure of disposing of end of life LRUs in the F-14 fleet just in case they mysteriously ended up at Bushehr
    Haven’t Indian Mig-21s proved superior to more modern aircraft in some exercises?
    It's certainly a handful WVR just because it's so small and hard to acquire visually but it's sensor/ECM/EW fit is hopelessly outdated now. However... its engine was very prone to compressor stalls so the operators had to be very able and brave to extract 100% performance from the airframe. Not all crew will fall into that gilded category.

    In its day the Fresco was absolutely lethal at close ranges. The 4477th TES at Tonopah used to fly them in the adversary role in 70s/80s and no USN/USAF pilot ever beat them on the first encounter.
  • PhilPhil Posts: 1,919
    edited January 2022
    MrEd said:

    Cookie said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    Interesting point.
    For most of history, slaves have been of the same race as slave owners, for obvious reasons - those of different races were too far away.
    But the slavery we are most familiar with was made easier for contemporaries to justify by its victims being of a different race - easier to view as 'not really human'. That said, IIRC, the main taboo was on Christians enslaving non-Christians - so perhaps being of a different religion was more important (and a 'primitive' religion too - other monotheists were afforded rather more respect).

    A nuance which is seldom discussed is that my understanding is that the British did little or no capturing of Africans for slavery - they were bought from other Africans (presumably losers in local wars?) That makes the British part in it only mildly less abhorrent, yes - but the role of how the slaves were enslaved in the first place is rarely discussed (and I certainly don't have any sort of handle on it).
    Correct. But, as Ishmael has just demonstrated, you get people who think that's ok for Africans to enslave others because they are not Christians and / or "of another culture". If that is your outlook on things, then you should throw away the rule book of Universal Rights, stop hectoring other nations such as China on violations, and accept that each set of people have the right to do their own thing, including chucking gays to their deaths from tall buildings and stoning women to death.
    This view (that the British were buying slaves from African slavers & therefore had more limited responsibility) also omits to mention that it was Europeans who were creating the demand for slaves which was being met by the slavers on the west coast of Africa. Those coastal tribes were meeting that demand in return for material goods (including the weapons that enabled them to efficiently capture slaves from the African interior). Yes, there was slavery in Africa that preceded the triangular trade but it was European driven demand that turbo-charged it into an engine of human exploitation that immiserated millions.

    (Ships that set out from Bristol alone were responsible for half a million slaves according to the records we have.)
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    edited January 2022
    eek said:

    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.

    Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
    Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
    Small pox didn't appear in December 2019 from nowhere. It was around for centuries prior to the vaccine becoming available which meant that when outbreaks occurred the number of people it could effect was small (everyone else had antibodies from the previous outbreak x years earlier).

    So your argument is fine for old diseases, it falls completely apart for new ones. You just haven't seen the flaws yet.
    But surely that also apploes to covid. It's just that the last outbreak (arguably in the 1880s) was too long for immunity to linger.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    eek said:

    Jonathan said:

    One important note on compulsory vaccination.

    Your liberties will not be determined by your actual vaccination status, they will be determined by government records.

    As we know government records are never completely accurate or immune from manipulation by some future bad actor.

    What would you do if the government said that you had not been vaccinated, when you had?

    You can stop manipulation by blockchaining the records.

    To Sandpit and @TSE I'm sorry for suggesting blockchain to fix anything but it does have a purpose in making a record immutable without creating bigger issues.
    So long as no-one creates an unregulated middle-man with 50%+1 of the votes, therefore eliminating the point of using a blockchain in the first place.

    https://slashdot.org/story/22/01/03/1447239/opensea-freezes-22m-of-stolen-bored-apes
    Oh I'm ignoring that whole Opensea Ape story - it's being going on now for over a week because people just don't understand how to perform the tasks required to 100% secure their assets. (Opensea raised $300m this week on a $3.3bn valuation btw).

    What's funny is that the people who are being stolen from are clever people, it's just that this stuff is so hard to get right incredibly few people can do it.
    LOL, Opensea being worth $3.5bn, is nearly as bad as Coinbase being worth $56bn - more than LSE and NYSE combined!
    Even that's nothing - just wait until people look behind the curtain at Tether ($80bn) and discover what is actually there...

    Ha, very true. There’s an old-fashioned ‘bank run’ coming on Tether at some point, and there’s not a fraction of the claimed USD behind them. They’re at playing fractional reserve banking, but without the central bank standing behind them.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
    Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
    Indeed.

    But you could then argue that if the Africans had said that they couldn't in conscience sell the slaves, then the slave trade would have been limited, which in turn would have limited the money and power the trade created which created the feedback loop which caused it to grow.

    Almost as if it was complex issue.
    Who said it wasn't? Or that opponents of Colston's statue aren't well-informed? Eminent historians like David Olusoga supported the removal of the statue. Personally I am not a historian, but I studied the American Civil War for a year at school, I've read books on the subject like CLR James's The Black Jacobins, I lived in the Caribbean for three years where slavery does not feel like ancient history, and in the US for five years where I visited plantation houses and Civil War battlefields and read up on the Civil Rights movement. I've thought about the issue a lot, and sought to educate myself on the subject, and my conclusion is that there simply should not be any slave traders or slave owners venerated in this country. Statues of them should be treated as historical artefacts, not idols and put in museums where they can be understood in their historical context.
  • SirNorfolkPassmoreSirNorfolkPassmore Posts: 6,168
    edited January 2022
    With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.

    Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.

    I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.
  • EabhalEabhal Posts: 5,781
    Still quite difficult to book a booster appointment at a time and place that is convenient.

    Fine if you have a car/flexibility but not all of us do. I can't drive at the mo and am not going to queue for ages while I'm still slinged up post-surgery.

    It's a bit pathetic given the rush is now over. There will be quite a few people my age who will give up on it.
  • GallowgateGallowgate Posts: 19,072
    eek said:

    Carnyx said:

    Dura_Ace said:

    Charles said:

    The state doesn’t have the right to require medical treatment.

    It happens frequently when people get sectioned.

    And smallpox vaccination used to be compulsory.

    Plus certain servants of the state are forced to be medically treated, AIUI. Members of the services for instance. Inoculations, prophylactics (against war gases), etc.
    Small pox jab was mandatory for children. Has it ever been mandatory for adults?
    Small pox didn't appear in December 2019 from nowhere. It was around for centuries prior to the vaccine becoming available which meant that when outbreaks occurred the number of people it could effect was small (everyone else had antibodies from the previous outbreak x years earlier).

    So your argument is fine for old diseases, it falls completely apart for new ones. You just haven't seen the flaws yet.
    My argument has nothing to do with the severity of the illness.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    How many BLM protests are there outside the Mauretanian embassy ?
    None.

    Nice to see Ishmael distorting what I said, which is that we shouldn't give other beliefs a pass on slavery just because they aren't Christian. So take back what you said at the moment Ishmael, because it is getting close to defamatory.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    kamski said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".

    What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
    When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
    Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
    OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.

    Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653
    edited January 2022

    All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.

    Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.

    What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.

    All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.

    You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.

    Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.

    Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).

    Jesus christ. Talk about imposing your will upon others.
    YBard's argument is a valid one. Shades of the Wakefield MMR furore, where parents who decided not to have their children vaccinated benefited from the herd immunity created by the children of other parents who did.

    To be honest, I'm not opposed to legally mandating it in theory. In practice however it will not work because cohorts will lobby to get themselves excluded from the mandate - for example for medical reasons (many dubious) and religiosity. Laws should apply to all.

    What appals me are the views of TSE and Nick P on here who are so utterly illiberal (from right and left) in demonising people who have made a legal choice.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    kamski said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".

    What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
    When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
    Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,149
    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
    Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
    Hmm, imagine a counterfactual where the British abolished their slave trade earlier than they did (perhaps partly because they never got iunvolved in the Caribbean and had the sense to retain all their North American colonies so that slavery did not take off in the USA).

    (a) much less demand for slaves
    (b) much earlier intervention by the Royal Navy, partly as an instrument of economic war against the continental European slave colonies, but also acting to suppress the Barbary trade

    (but this would be relevant mainly to West Africa)
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    This whole "but Africans were already enslaving each other, we just turned up to take them off their hands" argument ignores how the fact that European ships were turning up off the Gold Coast offering to buy slaves for huge amounts of money or its equivalent changed the incentives on offer, in effect distorting the entire African economy and society as warfare and slavery became the most profitable activities available.
    Yeah, but you also ignore the fact that the reason why African rulers sold off slaves was because they wanted to get rid of their enemies - the slaves were from conquered people. Do you think if the European ships had not turned up, those rulers would have been like "oh well, let's just release them back to their villages"? No, they would have been killed or sold to other traders, namely the Arabs.
    Wars were started in order to create slaves in West Africa to sell to European slave traders.
  • StockyStocky Posts: 9,653
    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions

    Doesn't that translate as "it doesn't matter what the Africans did, and sometimes still do, to other Africans as they do not have our beliefs" ?

    A rather racist view perhaps ?

    And wasn't it part of the reasoning of the enlightenment slave owner that they were ultimately lifting up their slaves to a higher level of civilisation ? While taking the current profit from so doing :wink:

    Given that the number of descendants of slavery who have migrated to Africa, whether from the USA, Brazil, Columbia, Jamaica or even Haiti is approximately zero they would doubtless say that 'lifting up' was achieved.
    Jesus Christ, you seem to have caught whatever MrEd is ailing from.

    "It is OK for me to do things to black men because other black men did similar things to a third set of black men" is about the most sht argument ever advanced, and the person advancing it in this case is MrEd. The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. For A to enslave B is always and everywhere a terribly, terribly wrong thing to do, colour and creed notwithstanding. Clear now?
    While I agree that what MrEd wrote was textbook whataboutery, I don't have a clue why "Christianity" makes it "even shittier".

    What makes the holocaust even shittier is that Hitler was (sometimes) a vegetarian!
    When I first heard Hitler was vegetarian, I was not in the least surprised. I just shrugged. In fact another piece of the jigsaw falls into place.
    Really, care to explain? Otherwise your comment comes across as pretty obnoxious.
    And bizarre.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.

    Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.

    I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.

    Did they do the walk-up, no-questions-asked vaccination centres in England? Aimed at illegal immigrants, overstayers, women who didn’t usually leave the house and anyone else who might have fallen through the cracks in society.
  • All vaccinations should be compulsory for everyone.

    Anti-vaxxers are portrayed as borderline nut jobs, but of course avoiding the vaccine is a completely rational act.

    What is completely irrational is publicising the fact that you are not vaccinated and encouraging others not to take the vaccine.

    All vaccines kill someone. The logical (but selfish) position is for everyone else bar yourself to take the (tiny) risk, and you don't.

    You then benefit from herd immunity. You want say 95 per cent of the population to be vaccinated, and then the remaining 5 per cent can free-load. To minimise the risk to yourself, you want to publicly extol the benefits of the vaccine while not taking it yourself.

    Not getting vaccinated is like tax evasion. Tax evaders take advantage of the pooled benefit without paying their fair share.

    Tax evasion is a criminal offence with heavy fines -- so should failure to take a vaccine (any vaccine).

    To get really dystopian you could have a requirement that anyone publicly refusing the vaccine and loudly advocating the same to be infected with COVID, perhaps once a year or whenever a new variant pops up. That way they’d be doing their little bit for the herd. Of course that would still leave your sneaky but logical & selfish feckers..
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
    Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
    OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.

    Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
    No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.

    It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. Phil, ages ago, Geldof did a BBC programme about slavery, and asserted it was 60% of the African economy before the British showed up.

    Even allowing for exaggeration, and while accepting that more demand will increase the price, it's perhaps not the case that slavery was other than endemic even before Europeans got involved.
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172

    With the completely unvaccinated, I do wonder whether there's a case for pushing fifty notes into their hand to get it done. There would certainly be annoyance from their more responsible neighbours who received nothing. But if it gets the rate up 5% at pretty low cost, perhaps it's worth it. I doubt it would materially affect uptake in future as it isn't enough for people to risk it on the off chance if they leave it many months then they might possibly extract £50 from Rishi.

    Put it this way - would I see it as a good use of public money to spend £50m on getting a million people vaccinated? Yes, I would.

    I guess it depends a bit on who the unvaccinated are. If they are hardcore Piers Corbynites, not doing it on principle, then it just wouldn't have an impact. Equally if they are typically rich, then it makes no odds to them. But if it's people who are a little reluctant, or rather disengaged from society, or reason as a 20-something that the risk/reward might be a bit balanced, it could tip some numbers.

    I met Piers once at a scientific conference when he was a grad student.

    If I recollect, he was a very clever guy .... he was the real brains of the Corbyn family.

    I think Piers subsequently had mental health problems and was not able to fulfil his academic potential or complete his PhD.

    It seems likely that his railing against scientific orthodoxy (both with regard to climate change and vaccination) stems from his own disappointment at lack of a conventional scientific career.

    Truth to tell, it is a sad case.
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    kamski said:

    HYUFD said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MattW said:

    MattW said:

    Foxy said:

    darkage said:

    Reflecting further on yesterdays discussions. The harsh and difficult reality is that both slavery and colonialism are features of human civilisation. The fact that a lot of people cannot come to terms with the fact that Britain both partook in and, eventually, abolished these institutions is really sad. It is actually laughable and pathetic; a failure of education.

    Britain is not perfect but remains one of the most progressive, least racist, countries in the world. Anyone who is truly concerned about racism or slavery need only to look to the developing world, where both are prevalent and expanding. Look no further than China.

    The abolition of slavery and colonialism are major achievements. But Britain is in a death spiral caused by a loss of confidence in itself and what it has achieved over its history. The people who continually do it down and seek to relitigate historic sins have no coherant vision of the future. They are just parasites destroying the host.

    No. The role of historians is to look at the past and reinterpret it. It always has been.

    The crimes of Empire are not centuries old, there are still survivors of British torture in Kenyan concentration camps alive for example.
    But you cannot reinterpret history without first studying it.

    Our current lot of aspirational iconoclasts do not want to study history; they want to use it as a quarry to pick out bits and pieces to justify the things they want to do, or have done.

    Those talking about 'slavery' want to ignore the black tribes who sold captives from other black tribes to the white man and the Islamic man in order to make money; they want to ignore black on black slavery in Africa (both still within contemporary memory);

    They want to forget about the Barbary Trade enslaving European people; they want to ignore the role of Empire in stopping slavery; and they (and perhaps we) want to ignore the wider historical compass, such as the role of slavery as foundational for the ancient societies we say we admire.

    They (and we) also need to think about the historic practice of selling-off of war captives.

    And they want to destroy history, without studying it in the round.

    That imo is why the unthinking anti-colonialist, BLM movements etc have to be questioned strongly enough to remove such deliberate biases.
    I would enthusiastically remove any statues to Barbary slavers on British High streets if you can direct me to them.
    A silly response to a serious point. It is not excusing slavery, or belittling its tragedy and the suffering it caused, to talk about the context of slavery contemporaneously around the world.

    If anything, ignoring the wider topic of slavery is excusing and belittling the suffering of millions of people, including down to the current day.
    My (perhaps contentious and at risk of being heavily criticised for obvious reasons) view is that race is usually the wrong prism for studying slavery, as sex is the wrong prism for studying rape.

    Both are about power, and its abuse.
    What is interesting about a lot of the talk in recent years around slavery is that so much of the focus has been on the Slave Trade i.e. the transporting of slaves, rather than Slavery, the actual nature of slavery per se.

    At first sight, that seems odd. Why focus on the logistics (cruel and demonic as they were)? Well, because it allows the issue to be presented as an European sin. Many cultures have practiced slavery and, when it came to the African slave trade (a) Arabs were responsible for most of it and (b) it was African rulers who sold people of their skin colour over to the white man. So, you focus on slavery per se, you quickly realise many parties were involved. However, if you focus on the transportation aspect, it allows the problem to be presented as a European one.

    Now, there are other factors. The abolitionists, for example, popularised the conditions in the slave ships and that led to outrage. Still, if the Europeans had not of conducted the trade, would the slaves have been released? The answer is No, because African rulers were selling their enemies - they would have been killed or sold to the Arabs.
    This "yebbut Africans enslaved other Africans" stuff really is whataboutery in its purest form. Just one answer to it is, the Africans didn't claim to have the benefit of Christianity and the Enlightenment to guide their actions.

    You attack the logistics because that is where you get most bang for your anti slavery buck. As a slightly salient current parallel, you go after the procuring and transportation of children for purposes of abuse, harder than you go after the end users.
    Arguably more slaves were enslaved by Barbary Islamists in North Africa than by Christians in the rest of Africa
    Oh goody, we can put more statues of slave traders up then?
    Also:
    Islamists?
    And "arguably" but in reality nowhere near.
    Why are the victims of our past aggressions and misdeeds more worthy of note and remembrance than those of the Barbary pirates and other non-western slavers?

    (Incidentally, the Barbary pirates raided more than just Africa: large swathes of coastal Europe were raided up to Cornwall and Ireland, leading many people to live inland away from the coast.)

    This matters. The vast over-simplification of slavery into we-were-uniquely-evil leads to an over-simplification of modern evils.
    Umm, are there any statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK?
    Not as far as I'm aware. But your comment rather proves the point.
    OK you seem to be saying that by pointing out the lack of statues of Barbary slave traders in the UK I am saying "we-were-uniquely-evil". This is just so unbelievably illogical that I am sure you must mean something else, so - what is your point? I am trying to establish exactly what this argument is about. I kind of thought it was about statues of slave traders in the UK.

    Your comments seem to be just pure whataboutery, but maybe I'm missing something.
    No. I'm saying by concentrating just on the statue of slavers in the UK is wrong. Slavery was - and sadly is - an international trade, and whilst we and some other countries industrialised it, it needs to be looked at in a totality. Especially if we are to learn lessons from it.

    It's like saying that because Hitler was evil, the evils of Stalin and Mao should not be mentioned. Or because Israel is doing wrong in the Middle East, the other actors doing wrong in the region get a free pass.
    Sorry, but the correct analogy for what you are saying is "you can't be in Germany and criticise Hitler without also criticising Stalin and Mao"
This discussion has been closed.