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

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  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.
    You obviously haven't read much of the latest literature on it, it is essentially portrayed as uniquely European and all other examples of slave tradery are not talked about. And you know what they say - silence is violence.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,146
    Selebian said:

    Carnyx said:

    Proposal for social and national unity: more GSTQ, more UJ and more patriotism esp on the BBC and schools

    https://www.thenational.scot/news/19828343.god-save-queen-minister-chris-philip-calls-national-anthem-sung/?ref=ebbn

    "We fully support the signing of the national anthem, Her Majesty the Queen and other expressions of patriotism – including the flying of the Union Jack" (emphasis mine)

    I'm not sure whether that refers to ensuring there are BSL signers every time the anthem is sung or whether it also encompasses encouraging people to scribble their signatures on HMQ.

    I assume the 'Union Jack' to be flown more is Alister Jack or Maybe Jackson Carlaw?
    Wouldn't cost much, running the same BSL loop every time BBC shuts down at night.

  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

    Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.

    You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
    I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
    First, I'm not American but my wife is.

    Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:

    "The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "

    So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"

    Just quoting your own words.

    As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them

    https://www.irishamerica.com/2015/10/the-irish-of-barbados-photos/

    And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.

    But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
    They weren't slaves, they were indentured labourers (ie they were tied to a specific employer to pay for their passage; some were transported involuntarily for perceived crimes, ie resisting Cromwell). They were harshly treated and many died and for some their experience was likely closer to slavery than to free labour. But their period of indenture was finite, their children were not born into slavery, they were given shoes and generally didn't do the same work as the African slaves. Slavery itself was a varied condition, of course, some slaves were skilled engineers who helped to build the windmills who still dot the island. Others were worked to death in the fields. Anyone who resisted was punished brutally.
    According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources.
    They do form an interesting community in Barbados, known as "Bajan whites" as opposed to "White Bajans" who are the descendents of the wealthy planter class. They had the most inpenetrable of all Bajan accents I found when I lived there. People said that some of them living in inland parishes had never been to the coast, which I found a little hard to believe on an island that small but may have been true I suppose. Arithmetically, in-breeding must have been a problem, and they have increasingly inter-married with their black neighbours (who are in reality mostly mixed race anyway). Rihanna has Bajan White roots, I think. The black community had generally good things to say about the Bajan Whites, more so than the White Bajans.
    Barbados is a fascinating country as well as a great place to go on holiday. The museum at the Garrison outside of Bridgetown has some interesting stuff in it, especially on slavery, and there has been a lot of good research on Caribbean history done at UWI.
    PS

    "According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources. "

    You are actually wrong. The Irish have talked about it for decades and the first main root of this is Sean O'Callaghan's "To Hell or Barbados" in the early 2000s. It had nothing to do with trying to counteract BLM so please stop trying to infer I am using white supremacist sources.
    I'm just saying you should be careful that you don't unwittingly cite someone with a dubious agenda. From Wiki:

    "Since the books were published, white supremacist and white nationalist groups have adopted the notion of Irish slavery, often as a means of countering the historical burden of African slavery and black Americans' demands for redress, or of undermining and attacking the Black Lives Matter movement.[26][27]

    This prompted scholars and writers such as Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly to speak out against the "myth of Irish slavery".[28]"
    Don't worry I won't. Believe it or not, in their eyes I would be worse than you, in that I would be a traitor as a white man marrying a black woman.
    Well I'm married to a Sri Lankan woman so I'm not sure I would be considered much better in the race traitor stakes.
    Tough call. I might edge it because they would probably mistake her for being Hispanic and therefore think she might turn Republican in the future (that's a joke on the white supremacists by the way).
    When we lived in the US people tended to assume she was the nanny, not helped by our eldest daughter looking white - my celtic genes are apparently very strong.
    Are you red headed per chance?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
  • pigeonpigeon Posts: 4,087
    On topic: The evidence of the last few weeks suggests that Omicron is essentially unstoppable at the population level, so there's no longer any point in trying to push the refusers into accepting the jabs (as a means of suppression and, by extension, a device to minimise the need for harmful restrictions to be imposed on other people, so as to alleviate the pressure on healthcare systems.) Indeed, it's ripping through the population in many countries, including both the UK and Italy, so fast that there is no time to offer reasonable protection to that portion of the remaining unvaccinated population who are going to catch Covid over the next few weeks, even if they change their minds. And if there's no longer a significant benefit to society to be had from imposing vaccination upon the remaining holdouts, then should governments be seeking to do it?
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Nigelb said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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"
    So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
    The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.

    Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.

    But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.

    If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
    Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
    I made a relative assessment not an absolute one.
    You talked bollox. ;)
    No I didn't. You misinterpreted one small part of what I said in an attempt to belittle me and win yourself internet points.

    It's boring and lame behaviour.
    Okay, I'll bite. In what way did I misinterpret what you wrote? The idea that Stalin was less expansionist than Hitler is an odd argument to make given their histories. This is actually the sort of thing I'm getting at wrt history and the way it echoes back on the modern world. Stalin's desire for a "containment/spheres of influence" echoes directly Putin's desires for Russia today. It was wrong under the British Empire; it was wrong under Stalin; and it will be wrong under Putin.

    You also call those eastern European countries 'client states'. Which they were - but that does not excuse the evil of that status. Vichy France was treated as a 'client state' by Hitler, for instance. Albania as well, I think.
    'Expansionist' is an odd word to use for someone who was maniacally determined to prosecute a world-wide race war - and was prepared to see his entire nation exterminated in the attempt, should they fail.

    Asking anyone to determine which of the two monsters was more evil seems morally fruitless. But they were monsters of different types.
    I agree with your last paragraph, which is exactly the point; they were both evil and (including Mao in this, if you don't mind) people still seem to like or even revere Stalin and Mao, and/or their bankrupt, evil systems.

    For the former paragraph, I'm unsure Hitler and Stalin were very different. The Holodomor is an example, and you might want to look up the Doctors' Plot if you don't know it.

    And we should all know it and the Holodomor, as much as we know about Hitler's evils.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

    Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.

    You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
    I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
    First, I'm not American but my wife is.

    Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:

    "The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "

    So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"

    Just quoting your own words.

    As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them

    https://www.irishamerica.com/2015/10/the-irish-of-barbados-photos/

    And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.

    But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
    They weren't slaves, they were indentured labourers (ie they were tied to a specific employer to pay for their passage; some were transported involuntarily for perceived crimes, ie resisting Cromwell). They were harshly treated and many died and for some their experience was likely closer to slavery than to free labour. But their period of indenture was finite, their children were not born into slavery, they were given shoes and generally didn't do the same work as the African slaves. Slavery itself was a varied condition, of course, some slaves were skilled engineers who helped to build the windmills who still dot the island. Others were worked to death in the fields. Anyone who resisted was punished brutally.
    According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources.
    They do form an interesting community in Barbados, known as "Bajan whites" as opposed to "White Bajans" who are the descendents of the wealthy planter class. They had the most inpenetrable of all Bajan accents I found when I lived there. People said that some of them living in inland parishes had never been to the coast, which I found a little hard to believe on an island that small but may have been true I suppose. Arithmetically, in-breeding must have been a problem, and they have increasingly inter-married with their black neighbours (who are in reality mostly mixed race anyway). Rihanna has Bajan White roots, I think. The black community had generally good things to say about the Bajan Whites, more so than the White Bajans.
    Barbados is a fascinating country as well as a great place to go on holiday. The museum at the Garrison outside of Bridgetown has some interesting stuff in it, especially on slavery, and there has been a lot of good research on Caribbean history done at UWI.
    PS

    "According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources. "

    You are actually wrong. The Irish have talked about it for decades and the first main root of this is Sean O'Callaghan's "To Hell or Barbados" in the early 2000s. It had nothing to do with trying to counteract BLM so please stop trying to infer I am using white supremacist sources.
    I'm just saying you should be careful that you don't unwittingly cite someone with a dubious agenda. From Wiki:

    "Since the books were published, white supremacist and white nationalist groups have adopted the notion of Irish slavery, often as a means of countering the historical burden of African slavery and black Americans' demands for redress, or of undermining and attacking the Black Lives Matter movement.[26][27]

    This prompted scholars and writers such as Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly to speak out against the "myth of Irish slavery".[28]"
    Don't worry I won't. Believe it or not, in their eyes I would be worse than you, in that I would be a traitor as a white man marrying a black woman.
    Well I'm married to a Sri Lankan woman so I'm not sure I would be considered much better in the race traitor stakes.
    Tough call. I might edge it because they would probably mistake her for being Hispanic and therefore think she might turn Republican in the future (that's a joke on the white supremacists by the way).
    When we lived in the US people tended to assume she was the nanny, not helped by our eldest daughter looking white - my celtic genes are apparently very strong.
    Are you red headed per chance?
    No, but I am extremely (hideously?) white.
  • kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    Hey! I thought I was the only vegetarian in the PB Village!
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257

    kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    I thought you were on my side! Your one of THEM 🙁
    Ha ha, no, sorry, I have been one of THEM for almost 35 years but I have a sense of humour. 😜
    Hmm, new acronym to me.

    Totalitarian Hitlerite Excluders of Meat? :wink:
  • Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    I have recently migrated both my own and my son's WhatsApp accounts to a new number. Unless Peppa has created an entirely new profile which all of his contacts have to then change to, he has migrated his phone number.

    That's how WhatsApp works. So his assumption is that Lord Geidt doesn't know and won't check when he says something so obviously stupid.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    rpjs said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    On the subject of juries, can someone explain why jurors in the US talk to the press after a case? Do they get good money for doing so? I can't recall ever seeing something like that here. Is that because it is a criminal offence here when it is not in the US?

    Yes, and yes.
    First Amendment.
    Indeed so!

    In the UK, it’s illegal to interview a juror about a case, even if you’re an academic or statistician trying to gather data on jury trials, and definitely if you’re a journalist with a cheque book!
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
  • MrEd said:

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.
    You obviously haven't read much of the latest literature on it, it is essentially portrayed as uniquely European and all other examples of slave tradery are not talked about. And you know what they say - silence is violence.
    Last country to officially abolish slavery was Mauretania, as recently as 1981.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    I have recently migrated both my own and my son's WhatsApp accounts to a new number. Unless Peppa has created an entirely new profile which all of his contacts have to then change to, he has migrated his phone number.

    That's how WhatsApp works. So his assumption is that Lord Geidt doesn't know and won't check when he says something so obviously stupid.
    Well, it didn't work for me when changing it to the same number!
  • Stocky said:

    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.
    Calm your tits.

    There are consequences from a legal choice, this is just that.

    Choosing not to obtain a driving licence has consequences, for example you cannot drive a car, this is just an extension of that.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    pigeon said:

    On topic: The evidence of the last few weeks suggests that Omicron is essentially unstoppable at the population level, so there's no longer any point in trying to push the refusers into accepting the jabs (as a means of suppression and, by extension, a device to minimise the need for harmful restrictions to be imposed on other people, so as to alleviate the pressure on healthcare systems.) Indeed, it's ripping through the population in many countries, including both the UK and Italy, so fast that there is no time to offer reasonable protection to that portion of the remaining unvaccinated population who are going to catch Covid over the next few weeks, even if they change their minds. And if there's no longer a significant benefit to society to be had from imposing vaccination upon the remaining holdouts, then should governments be seeking to do it?

    Yes, immunity after vaccination and infection > Immunity after infection. This wave will play out come what may, it's the next one we want to try and keep as low as possible.
  • Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    I have recently migrated both my own and my son's WhatsApp accounts to a new number. Unless Peppa has created an entirely new profile which all of his contacts have to then change to, he has migrated his phone number.

    That's how WhatsApp works. So his assumption is that Lord Geidt doesn't know and won't check when he says something so obviously stupid.
    Well, it didn't work for me when changing it to the same number!
    Did you back up all chats first?
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. Jessop, exactly. We came within a few thousand votes of a man who marched alongside banners of Stalin and the hammer and sickle becoming PM. That by itself should've disqualified him, just as anyone marching with Hitler portraits and swastika flags should be unacceptable.
  • AlistairAlistair Posts: 23,670

    Stocky said:

    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.
    Calm your tits.

    There are consequences from a legal choice, this is just that.

    Choosing not to obtain a driving licence has consequences, for example you cannot drive a car, this is just an extension of that.
    I'm sorry, driving liscenceless people are having their liberty impinged. This must be repealed forthwith.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257
    Sandpit said:

    rpjs said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    On the subject of juries, can someone explain why jurors in the US talk to the press after a case? Do they get good money for doing so? I can't recall ever seeing something like that here. Is that because it is a criminal offence here when it is not in the US?

    Yes, and yes.
    First Amendment.
    Indeed so!

    In the UK, it’s illegal to interview a juror about a case, even if you’re an academic or statistician trying to gather data on jury trials, and definitely if you’re a journalist with a cheque book!
    Interesting, that bit on research - would be useful to be able to have studies on how juries operate, how people come to certain conclusions. I wonder whether there are exceptions. The Health Sec, for example, has the power to permit on a case by case basis some things that would otherwise be illegal with respect to data access etc. I've been involved in a study in the past in which we had to go that route - it was research supporting a government review and would have been more or less impossible without those data, so we didn't face much oppositio, but it still took some time to get through (layers of civil service, including legal teams, before we got to put it directly to the Health Sec).
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
    Haha Kinablu, ok I will. It wasn't criminal because the jury said it wasn't.

    And yes I promise.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

    Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.

    You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
    I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
    First, I'm not American but my wife is.

    Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:

    "The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "

    So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"

    Just quoting your own words.

    As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them

    https://www.irishamerica.com/2015/10/the-irish-of-barbados-photos/

    And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.

    But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
    They weren't slaves, they were indentured labourers (ie they were tied to a specific employer to pay for their passage; some were transported involuntarily for perceived crimes, ie resisting Cromwell). They were harshly treated and many died and for some their experience was likely closer to slavery than to free labour. But their period of indenture was finite, their children were not born into slavery, they were given shoes and generally didn't do the same work as the African slaves. Slavery itself was a varied condition, of course, some slaves were skilled engineers who helped to build the windmills who still dot the island. Others were worked to death in the fields. Anyone who resisted was punished brutally.
    According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources.
    They do form an interesting community in Barbados, known as "Bajan whites" as opposed to "White Bajans" who are the descendents of the wealthy planter class. They had the most inpenetrable of all Bajan accents I found when I lived there. People said that some of them living in inland parishes had never been to the coast, which I found a little hard to believe on an island that small but may have been true I suppose. Arithmetically, in-breeding must have been a problem, and they have increasingly inter-married with their black neighbours (who are in reality mostly mixed race anyway). Rihanna has Bajan White roots, I think. The black community had generally good things to say about the Bajan Whites, more so than the White Bajans.
    Barbados is a fascinating country as well as a great place to go on holiday. The museum at the Garrison outside of Bridgetown has some interesting stuff in it, especially on slavery, and there has been a lot of good research on Caribbean history done at UWI.
    PS

    "According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources. "

    You are actually wrong. The Irish have talked about it for decades and the first main root of this is Sean O'Callaghan's "To Hell or Barbados" in the early 2000s. It had nothing to do with trying to counteract BLM so please stop trying to infer I am using white supremacist sources.
    I'm just saying you should be careful that you don't unwittingly cite someone with a dubious agenda. From Wiki:

    "Since the books were published, white supremacist and white nationalist groups have adopted the notion of Irish slavery, often as a means of countering the historical burden of African slavery and black Americans' demands for redress, or of undermining and attacking the Black Lives Matter movement.[26][27]

    This prompted scholars and writers such as Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly to speak out against the "myth of Irish slavery".[28]"
    Don't worry I won't. Believe it or not, in their eyes I would be worse than you, in that I would be a traitor as a white man marrying a black woman.
    Well I'm married to a Sri Lankan woman so I'm not sure I would be considered much better in the race traitor stakes.
    Tough call. I might edge it because they would probably mistake her for being Hispanic and therefore think she might turn Republican in the future (that's a joke on the white supremacists by the way).
    When we lived in the US people tended to assume she was the nanny, not helped by our eldest daughter looking white - my celtic genes are apparently very strong.
    Are you red headed per chance?
    No, but I am extremely (hideously?) white.
    Keep it as extremely.
  • Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
  • TheuniondivvieTheuniondivvie Posts: 39,748
    edited January 2022
    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.
    You obviously haven't read much of the latest literature on it, it is essentially portrayed as uniquely European and all other examples of slave tradery are not talked about. And you know what they say - silence is violence.
    Can you supply a link or links? I'd be most interested in the literature that clearly posits that slavery was a uniquely European phenomenon, if only to point and laugh at it.
    Of course you can't be referring to any posters on here because absolutely no one has suggested IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON.
  • On Djokovic, I see it was discussed here earlier but I didn't notice the crucial detail that I heard on the radio mentioned. Apologies if I missed it, but..

    The State rule for domestic travel to Victoria is that you can have been previously infected, rather than vaccinated. Apparently all that Djokovic has is "proof" that he's been infected.

    The Federal rule for entering Australia has no such exemption. You have to prove that you are unable to be vaccinated. It's quite clear that any State rules are in addition.

    "Proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons when coming to Australia
    If you are coming to Australia and have a medical contraindication recorded in the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) you can show an Australian COVID-19 digital certificate to airline staff. You can otherwise show your immunisation history statement.

    If you do not have your medical contraindication recorded in the AIR you will need to show airline staff a medical certificate that indicates you are unable to be vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine because of a medical condition. The medical certificate must be in English and include the following information:

    your name (this must match your travel identification documents)
    date of medical consultation and details of your medical practitioner
    details that clearly acknowledge that you have a medical condition which means you cannot receive a COVID-19 vaccination (vaccination is contraindicated).
    Airlines are responsible for ensuring your proof meets these requirements.

    People who have received non-TGA approved or recognised vaccines should not be certified in this category and cannot be treated as vaccinated for the purposes of their travel.

    You should check any requirements, particularly quarantine and post-arrival testing requirements, in the state or territory to which you are travelling as this will impact your travel arrangements.

    If you are planning on traveling onwards to or through a different state or territory when you arrive in Australia, you need to check domestic travel restrictions. States and territories can apply their own travel restrictions.

    You are responsible for complying with travel restrictions and requirements that apply to you. Please note: proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons is separate to a Commissioner’s travel exemption."
    https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/vaccinated-travellers#toc-6

    I'm sure they won't let him in. He might be able to sue his airline.
  • I'm too busy to do more than occasionally dive in and out, but is much of the debate about Juries because of the Colson case?

    Juries can acquit for whatever reason they like. Its a demonstrable fact that the 4 tits pushed the statue into the water, but the jury have decided that it doesn't constitute criminal damage.

    Isn't that the whole point of a jury system? Or can we now expect Priti Vacant to try and abolish trial by jury? Mind you, with both mega cuts and Covid the legal system has defacto done so with so big a backlog...
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,168
    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    They were charged with criminal damage. A due process (trial by jury) found them not guilty. Ergo, whatever they did was not criminal damage.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    Selebian said:

    Sandpit said:

    rpjs said:

    Sandpit said:

    tlg86 said:

    On the subject of juries, can someone explain why jurors in the US talk to the press after a case? Do they get good money for doing so? I can't recall ever seeing something like that here. Is that because it is a criminal offence here when it is not in the US?

    Yes, and yes.
    First Amendment.
    Indeed so!

    In the UK, it’s illegal to interview a juror about a case, even if you’re an academic or statistician trying to gather data on jury trials, and definitely if you’re a journalist with a cheque book!
    Interesting, that bit on research - would be useful to be able to have studies on how juries operate, how people come to certain conclusions. I wonder whether there are exceptions. The Health Sec, for example, has the power to permit on a case by case basis some things that would otherwise be illegal with respect to data access etc. I've been involved in a study in the past in which we had to go that route - it was research supporting a government review and would have been more or less impossible without those data, so we didn't face much oppositio, but it still took some time to get through (layers of civil service, including legal teams, before we got to put it directly to the Health Sec).
    Turns out there is actually a single academic research group working with juries.
    https://www.ucl.ac.uk/made-at-ucl/stories/ground-breaking-research-ensure-juries-are-fair-and-effective
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,039

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    They were charged with criminal damage. A due process (trial by jury) found them not guilty. Ergo, whatever they did was not criminal damage.
    Thread from a lawyer:

    Matthew Scott
    @Barristerblog
    The jury had at least 3 separate legal routes to finding the defendants not guilty. The verdict was absolutely not an "assault on the rule of law."

    https://twitter.com/Barristerblog/status/1478845243340599304
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    You do know that you can get the porn online these days, don’t you?
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880

    kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    I thought you were on my side! Your one of THEM 🙁
    Ha ha, no, sorry, I have been one of THEM for almost 35 years but I have a sense of humour. 😜
    Can you not smell this bacon I have frying, calling you like a religious calling?

    Anointed now with Daddies Sauce

    Come back to the light. It says.
    Bacon is the toughest, but I am strong. I can even fry it for my kids without eating it.
    Bacon is practically poison anyway. Leaving aside the atrocity of treating the animal like shit and killing it.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    edited January 2022

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    They were charged with criminal damage. A due process (trial by jury) found them not guilty. Ergo, whatever they did was not criminal damage.
    Thread from a lawyer:

    Matthew Scott
    @Barristerblog
    The jury had at least 3 separate legal routes to finding the defendants not guilty. The verdict was absolutely not an "assault on the rule of law."

    https://twitter.com/Barristerblog/status/1478845243340599304
    He's letting his political prejudices show with that tweet.

    Here's a more sane assessment with his own blog.

    https://barristerblogger.com/2020/06/08/the-colston-statue-destroyers-have-no-defence-in-law-but-they-will-never-be-convicted/

    It's a simple case of Bushel's.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574

    Nigelb said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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"
    So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
    The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.

    Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.

    But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.

    If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
    Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
    I made a relative assessment not an absolute one.
    You talked bollox. ;)
    No I didn't. You misinterpreted one small part of what I said in an attempt to belittle me and win yourself internet points.

    It's boring and lame behaviour.
    Okay, I'll bite. In what way did I misinterpret what you wrote? The idea that Stalin was less expansionist than Hitler is an odd argument to make given their histories. This is actually the sort of thing I'm getting at wrt history and the way it echoes back on the modern world. Stalin's desire for a "containment/spheres of influence" echoes directly Putin's desires for Russia today. It was wrong under the British Empire; it was wrong under Stalin; and it will be wrong under Putin.

    You also call those eastern European countries 'client states'. Which they were - but that does not excuse the evil of that status. Vichy France was treated as a 'client state' by Hitler, for instance. Albania as well, I think.
    'Expansionist' is an odd word to use for someone who was maniacally determined to prosecute a world-wide race war - and was prepared to see his entire nation exterminated in the attempt, should they fail.

    Asking anyone to determine which of the two monsters was more evil seems morally fruitless. But they were monsters of different types.
    I agree with your last paragraph, which is exactly the point; they were both evil and (including Mao in this, if you don't mind) people still seem to like or even revere Stalin and Mao, and/or their bankrupt, evil systems.

    For the former paragraph, I'm unsure Hitler and Stalin were very different. The Holodomor is an example, and you might want to look up the Doctors' Plot if you don't know it.

    And we should all know it and the Holodomor, as much as we know about Hitler's evils.
    Agreed - I've previously recommended Snyder's book on the subject.
    But there was a cold political rationale to the Ukraine genocide, which I think was absent from Nazi ideology.

    Does it matter ?
    Possibly, since communism is an ideology which lays claim to universal appeal, whereas the need to oppose Nazism is simply a matter of survival for much for the world.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257
    edited January 2022
    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
    Just need an inialism (like IANAL) to preface each statement:
    IDCATASEBAGAATAATBPSALGTATBAWSSAAATT* but Colston was a wrong'un, wasn't he?

    Simple :wink:

    *I duly condemn all tyranny and slavery everywhere by any group at any time and acknowledge that bad people sometimes also did good things and their bad actions were sometimes seen as acceptable at the time
  • TimSTimS Posts: 9,160

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.

    MrEd said:


    Nope, wrong love. I have never sought to trivalise it. I think it was hugely evil and abhorrent. I was pointing out that it wasn't an uniquely European phenomenon and, in relation to you, that slavery is evil whoever practices it. There's no "it's worse because they are Christians".

    Absolutely no one: IT WAS A UNIQUELY EUROPEAN PHENOMENON

    Someone: I'm pointing out it was not a uniquely European phenomenon

    Agreement of sorts, I guess.
    You obviously haven't read much of the latest literature on it, it is essentially portrayed as uniquely European and all other examples of slave tradery are not talked about. And you know what they say - silence is violence.
    Last country to officially abolish slavery was Mauretania, as recently as 1981.
    Still plenty of it there, informally, by all accounts.

    Slavery is an example of how humans, wherever they come from, have the capacity to be and do evil. National and power structures provide the opportunity.

    The way I see the question of inherited ancestral guilt is this: there should be symmetrical treatment of both pride and shame. If you are proud of the good things your ancestors did in the past, and feel that this somehow rubs off on your own virtue, then you also need to feel accountability for the shameful acts carried out by your ancestors. If on the other hand you don't take a national or ethnic view of history, and instead see yourself as human first and foremost, then neither the sins of the ancestors nor their achievements are your responsibility.

    It gets murkier when someone benefits materially from actions in the past (as we all do - ultimately we benefit from the fact someone in Sumeria invented the wheel, for example) if those actions inflicted long term harm which is still felt today and affects the life chances and wellbeing of others. In the case of African slavery that is demonstrably so, and likewise there's an argument for this in the unrest in the Middle East. Less clear cut for other shady acts of our history.
  • RattersRatters Posts: 756

    Stocky said:

    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.
    Calm your tits.

    There are consequences from a legal choice, this is just that.

    Choosing not to obtain a driving licence has consequences, for example you cannot drive a car, this is just an extension of that.
    The analogy is nonsense. There are qualifications to doing all kinds of activities, whether driving, practicing law or all manner of things. There are clear reasons why you need to demonstrate a level of skill to practice them.

    An unvaccinated person does not lack the skills needed to go to the theatre. Nor do they necessarily present a higher Covid risk to other attendees than a vaccinated secondary school teacher that goes clubbing at weekends.

    In my view there should be no activity off limits based on vaccination status. But in favour of as kind of income tax surcharge to reflect the additional cost unvaccinated people put upon the NHS in aggregate (analogous to how we tax other externalities like smoking).
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 15,545
    Aficionados of the State of the Union may find this piece interesting. Don't necessarily agree with it - muddling through can be the most effective approach - food for thought nevertheless on the possible imminent demise of the Union.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1478635488693080068
  • kjhkjh Posts: 10,458
    edited January 2022
    OK I am going to ask what is probably an idiotic question but I'm struggling to get this gas prices issue. I understand why it happened in the first place but we have had it for a few months now and gas is a commodity type product and not (I believe) something that has a huge timeline in changing supply volumes so why is it still an issue? I appreciate the UK storage issue, but the price issue isn't unique to the UK.
  • Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    You do know that you can get the porn online these days, don’t you?
    There is no porn on my phone.

    I've had iPhones since 2010 and so I've effectively better part of 12 years worth of texts, Whatsapp, pictures, and videos on there, which I like having on my phone. I back them up the cloud, but I don't want to be at the mercy of an iCloud outage/issue, some of these photos, videos, and texts, are utterly irreplaceable.

    It's great to be able to look at the messages that made me happy in 2012.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,168
    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    There is no doubt we British were major participants in the global slave trade from the 16th to early 19th century. We were guilty of that.

    In the global all time slaveowners ranking though the Arabs, Romans and Portuguese in Brazil were ahead of us
    @HYUFD That is an excellent, concise and clear post. I have no idea about the ranking but happy to assume you are right for the point I want to make, which is that some wish to muddy the water by focusing on those that were worse than us.

    a) Although some were worse, it does not excuse what we did.

    b) We focus on what we did and less on what others did because that is our history.

    Our only defence is that it wasn't our atrocities but our ancestors and that times were different then.
    Portuguese, yes, obviously. Are there estimates somewhere for the Romans’ total?
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,280
    "Steven Barrett
    The Colston verdict is the triumph of values, not law
    And politics is for parliament, not the courts"

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-colston-verdict-is-the-triumph-of-values-not-law
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    There is no doubt we British were major participants in the global slave trade from the 16th to early 19th century. We were guilty of that.

    In the global all time slaveowners ranking though the Arabs, Romans and Portuguese in Brazil were ahead of us
    @HYUFD That is an excellent, concise and clear post. I have no idea about the ranking but happy to assume you are right for the point I want to make, which is that some wish to muddy the water by focusing on those that were worse than us.

    a) Although some were worse, it does not excuse what we did.

    b) We focus on what we did and less on what others did because that is our history.

    Our only defence is that it wasn't our atrocities but our ancestors and that times were different then.
    Portuguese, yes, obviously. Are there estimates somewhere for the Romans’ total?
    Between 5-10 million.
    https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-myth/slavery-ancient-rome#:~:text=Scholars estimate about 10% (but,and ten million were enslaved.

    The Vikings also obviously had a few too but much lower down the league table
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    MrEd said:

    IshmaelZ said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    No, they were not. And look at where the main slave routes developed:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa

    Essentially North African and along the Eastern part. Away from European influence for the most part.

    You talk about whataboutery but the amount of mental gymnastics you and Ishmael do to try and claim this is a whites-only policy is totally laughable.
    I never said or suggested it was a whites only problem. The whataboutery in this conversation is all from you. The aspect of the problem that your utterly dysfunctional nation has to address is, however, whites only. The number of poor American blacks whose plight is the direct result of horrific greed and cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine, is about 46 million, and the number whose plight arises from black on black slave trading is approximately nil.
    First, I'm not American but my wife is.

    Actually, Ishmael, technically you didn't say it was a whites only problem but what you did say was:

    "The relevance of Christianity etc etc is only that, almost unbelievably, it makes it even shitter than it was in the first place. "

    So what you said was "slavery is bad but it's even badder if it is done by Chrstians"

    Just quoting your own words.

    As for "cruelty on the part of your white ancestors and mine", I'm actually mainly Irish. And guess what? The Irish were sold into slavery. In fact, the Irish were the first slaves in several of the islands such as Barbados - 50,000 of them

    https://www.irishamerica.com/2015/10/the-irish-of-barbados-photos/

    And the reason why African slaves were brought over to the West Indies? Because the Irish slaves were dying because of heat and / or post-the end of Cromwell, there was not the same supply of slaves.

    But, hey, those sorts of slaves don't count. You and Kamski ought to organise the annual "let's whip ourselves because we are white" annual party.
    They weren't slaves, they were indentured labourers (ie they were tied to a specific employer to pay for their passage; some were transported involuntarily for perceived crimes, ie resisting Cromwell). They were harshly treated and many died and for some their experience was likely closer to slavery than to free labour. But their period of indenture was finite, their children were not born into slavery, they were given shoes and generally didn't do the same work as the African slaves. Slavery itself was a varied condition, of course, some slaves were skilled engineers who helped to build the windmills who still dot the island. Others were worked to death in the fields. Anyone who resisted was punished brutally.
    According to Wikipedia, efforts to label indentured whites as slaves generally come from white supremacists and others seeking to discredit the BLM movement, and have been discredited by historians, so I would be careful with your sources.
    They do form an interesting community in Barbados, known as "Bajan whites" as opposed to "White Bajans" who are the descendents of the wealthy planter class. They had the most inpenetrable of all Bajan accents I found when I lived there. People said that some of them living in inland parishes had never been to the coast, which I found a little hard to believe on an island that small but may have been true I suppose. Arithmetically, in-breeding must have been a problem, and they have increasingly inter-married with their black neighbours (who are in reality mostly mixed race anyway). Rihanna has Bajan White roots, I think. The black community had generally good things to say about the Bajan Whites, more so than the White Bajans.
    Barbados is a fascinating country as well as a great place to go on holiday. The museum at the Garrison outside of Bridgetown has some interesting stuff in it, especially on slavery, and there has been a lot of good research on Caribbean history done at UWI.
    Do you know anything about what happened with Cromwell in Ireland in the 1650s?

    They were deported and split from their families.

    "French priest Father Antoine Biet visited Barbados in 1654 and lamented how poorly the servants were treated. He commented that some of the families who were forcibly deported to the colony were split up and purposely sold to different planters as part of their punishment. If servants left the plantation without permission from their master, this unaccounted-for time was added to their term of indenture. Enslaved Africans, who were owned for life, were beaten for similar infractions. If indentured servants assaulted another servant or a slave it was treated as a misdemeanour and they were fined. If they assaulted their master, they were whipped. Their indenture was legal property, and therefore a servant’s remaining time could be left in wills, traded for commodities and sold. Since one’s labour is inseparable from one’s person, indentured servants in Barbados were temporarily treated as a sort of commodity."

    They were essentially slaves.

    Your argument shows just how much down the rabbit hole the woke-ist view has gone. You can't admit the suffering or evil done to other people or seek to downplay it because that takes away from the overriding theme. It really is nuts.
    No. I said that their treatment was frequently very similar to that of slaves, but that it was nevertheless innacurate to describe them as slaves. That's not being woke, it's being precise, and it is also the view of respected historians in the field.
    It's being legalistic. They suffered horribly and were deported against their will and, unlike in Australia, treated as personal property.
    Please try to understand what is meant by the word "whataboutery."
    Oh I do.

    I think the Oxford definition says "very useful term for those on the left to defend a position which is logically inconsistent with their loudly proclaimed beliefs. For example, if one is asked "why are you not protesting outside the Saudi Embassy if you are campaigning for gay rights", you shout "whataboutery"

    It is why I respect a lot people like Peter Thatchell a lot - he's not scared to be accused of being racist, Islamophobic etc etc in the support of his cause.

    A parallel meaning of 'whataboutery' is the form of argument which responds to a question or criticism X by ignoring it and saying 'what about Y'. This is a valuable though intellectually worthless form for both left and right, and for PMQs, and between schoolchildren of all ages.



  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited January 2022

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
  • EndillionEndillion Posts: 4,960
    Selebian said:

    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
    Just need an inialism (like IANAL) to preface each statement:
    IDCATASEBAGAATAATBPSALGTATBAWSSAAATT* but Colston was a wrong'un, wasn't he?

    Simple :wink:

    *I duly condemn all tyranny and slavery everywhere by any group at any time and acknowledge that bad people sometimes also did good things and their bad actions were sometimes seen as acceptable at the time
    Just IDC will do, thanks.
  • Andy_JSAndy_JS Posts: 26,280
    tlg86 said:

    On the subject of juries, can someone explain why jurors in the US talk to the press after a case? Do they get good money for doing so? I can't recall ever seeing something like that here. Is that because it is a criminal offence here when it is not in the US?

    It's not allowed here. Good thing in my opinion.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    There is no doubt we British were major participants in the global slave trade from the 16th to early 19th century. We were guilty of that.

    In the global all time slaveowners ranking though the Arabs, Romans and Portuguese in Brazil were ahead of us
    @HYUFD That is an excellent, concise and clear post. I have no idea about the ranking but happy to assume you are right for the point I want to make, which is that some wish to muddy the water by focusing on those that were worse than us.

    a) Although some were worse, it does not excuse what we did.

    b) We focus on what we did and less on what others did because that is our history.

    Our only defence is that it wasn't our atrocities but our ancestors and that times were different then.
    Portuguese, yes, obviously. Are there estimates somewhere for the Romans’ total?
    Between 5-10 million.
    https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-myth/slavery-ancient-rome#:~:text=Scholars estimate about 10% (but,and ten million were enslaved.

    The Vikings also obviously had a few too but much lower down the league table
    When we are looking at historical numbers surely we should be comparing it as a percentage of the total human population at the time rather than headline figures

    Note - I know that doesn't help us that much...
  • RobDRobD Posts: 58,941
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    According to Guido 15 years, but a (then) recent PopBitch article forced the change.
  • Now acting as liaison trying to fix this customs issue. Chain is Customs agent > Customer > Me > Factory team > Haulier. Information that appears on one screen doesn't appear on the same system on a different screen. Haulier doesn't seem to understand the system just changed and even if they did the paperwork they should have they don't have - but HMRC *may* have.

    Certainly a boon for the UK that we removed all that EU red tape.
  • TheScreamingEaglesTheScreamingEagles Posts: 113,969
    edited January 2022
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    Yes it was Boris, even I had Boris Johnson's number going back to 2012.

    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    People at a certain level of celebrity change their phone numbers regularly.

    Source - was a member of Home House for a number of years and interacted with a number of A-listers.
  • eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    Sure - he needed a number not known to the public. So he gets a new number and transfers things across that need transferring across and leaves the things that aren't. If some of the contacts were via WhatsApp those people wouldn't have his new number and couldn't contact, but he can still access everything on his account.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. Eagles, but this presents a difficult conundrum: is Boris Johnson more incompetent than he is deceitful, or vice versa?
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


    All I can say it didn't work for me. Believe that, or believe it not.

    And I am reasonably tech-savvy.
  • Mr. Eagles, but this presents a difficult conundrum: is Boris Johnson more incompetent than he is deceitful, or vice versa?

    As somebody who knows him well says it comes down to Boris Johnson being lazy then when he's in a mess he lies and rushes things and act incompetently.

    The stress of the latter makes him lazy as he needs a rest.
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
    Haha Kinablu, ok I will. It wasn't criminal because the jury said it wasn't.

    And yes I promise.
    ... said it wasn't having heard the evidence and considered the context.

    But, ok, good enough. Your response to any future posts of mine which are critical of our colonialism and its legacy will not be to accuse me of turning a blind eye to other things.

    You'll have to come up with a different line of crap. This is progress.
  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,087
    Nigelb said:

    Nigelb said:

    MrEd said:

    kamski said:

    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"
    So, do you think Stalin and Mao were on a par with Hitler for evil or less so. I'm genuinely interested and though you make so many assumptions about me, I will wait for your answer to decide what assumptions I make about you.
    The main difference between Hitler and Stalin/Mao was that Hitler was more aggressively expansionist and reckless, and so was a more direct and immediate threat to people outside Germany's borders.

    Stalin/Mao were perhaps more cautious and paranoid, and so a policy of containment/spheres of influence could limit their malign influence to within their own borders (and those of client states) without having to fight a general war of survival.

    But I think the main point of the discussion is that it becomes very difficult to talk about specific issues if you introduce a requirement that someone had to give a general overview of evil in all its forms in order to talk about a specific manifestation of evil.

    If you weren't able to talk about lung cancer without also talking about all other forms of cancer, or all other potentially life-threatening illnesses, then it would be difficult to talk about lung cancer. Sometimes it makes sense to talk about the general, but using it to avoid talking about the specific is rightly derided as whataboutery.
    Stalin not expansionist? The countries of Eastern Europe post-1945 might find that comment a little strange...
    I made a relative assessment not an absolute one.
    You talked bollox. ;)
    No I didn't. You misinterpreted one small part of what I said in an attempt to belittle me and win yourself internet points.

    It's boring and lame behaviour.
    Okay, I'll bite. In what way did I misinterpret what you wrote? The idea that Stalin was less expansionist than Hitler is an odd argument to make given their histories. This is actually the sort of thing I'm getting at wrt history and the way it echoes back on the modern world. Stalin's desire for a "containment/spheres of influence" echoes directly Putin's desires for Russia today. It was wrong under the British Empire; it was wrong under Stalin; and it will be wrong under Putin.

    You also call those eastern European countries 'client states'. Which they were - but that does not excuse the evil of that status. Vichy France was treated as a 'client state' by Hitler, for instance. Albania as well, I think.
    'Expansionist' is an odd word to use for someone who was maniacally determined to prosecute a world-wide race war - and was prepared to see his entire nation exterminated in the attempt, should they fail.

    Asking anyone to determine which of the two monsters was more evil seems morally fruitless. But they were monsters of different types.
    I agree with your last paragraph, which is exactly the point; they were both evil and (including Mao in this, if you don't mind) people still seem to like or even revere Stalin and Mao, and/or their bankrupt, evil systems.

    For the former paragraph, I'm unsure Hitler and Stalin were very different. The Holodomor is an example, and you might want to look up the Doctors' Plot if you don't know it.

    And we should all know it and the Holodomor, as much as we know about Hitler's evils.
    Agreed - I've previously recommended Snyder's book on the subject.
    But there was a cold political rationale to the Ukraine genocide, which I think was absent from Nazi ideology.
    I think that the expansion east qualifies as cold political rationale.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited January 2022

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    Yes it was Boris, even I had Boris Johnson's number going back to 2012.

    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


    Do you think Boris knew what he was doing with WhatsApp?

    As you say it gives you an option to do X and Y. Boris picked the option that looked best for him (which was probably the one that lost the messages given that he was trying to fix the issue people knowing his number)

    I used to daily (when doing support type work) deal with people who pick the incorrect option because they didn't understand what the question was actually asking them...
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    People at a certain level of celebrity change their phone numbers regularly.

    Source - was a member of Home House for a number of years and interacted with a number of A-listers.
    This is probably wrong, but the website gives off an upmarket swingers club vibe.
  • eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


    All I can say it didn't work for me. Believe that, or believe it not.

    And I am reasonably tech-savvy.
    I doubt you are tech-savvy, the constant attacks on Apple is my evidence.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,168
    HYUFD said:

    kjh said:

    HYUFD said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    There is no doubt we British were major participants in the global slave trade from the 16th to early 19th century. We were guilty of that.

    In the global all time slaveowners ranking though the Arabs, Romans and Portuguese in Brazil were ahead of us
    @HYUFD That is an excellent, concise and clear post. I have no idea about the ranking but happy to assume you are right for the point I want to make, which is that some wish to muddy the water by focusing on those that were worse than us.

    a) Although some were worse, it does not excuse what we did.

    b) We focus on what we did and less on what others did because that is our history.

    Our only defence is that it wasn't our atrocities but our ancestors and that times were different then.
    Portuguese, yes, obviously. Are there estimates somewhere for the Romans’ total?
    Between 5-10 million.
    https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/nero-man-behind-myth/slavery-ancient-rome#:~:text=Scholars estimate about 10% (but,and ten million were enslaved.

    The Vikings also obviously had a few too but much lower down the league table
    Thanks. What’s the number for Britain?* I’ve seen 3.1 million enslaved people being shipped out of Africa by the British. However, the descendants of slaves were also enslaved, so the total number of people enslaved by the British Empire was greater.

    * During the period of the transatlantic slave trade and imperial possessions in the Americas. That is, not counting earlier periods of slavery, e.g. the Anglo-Saxons had slaves before the Normans abolished slavery.
  • FF43 said:

    Aficionados of the State of the Union may find this piece interesting. Don't necessarily agree with it - muddling through can be the most effective approach - food for thought nevertheless on the possible imminent demise of the Union.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1478635488693080068

    It was interesting if overly long. I'm assuming the demise of Britishness is a matter of some regret for the author? I thought the point that Britain is not a traditional country like most others was well made. Intriguing to speculate on who the person of Austro-Hungarian descent with the public profile who feared the same fate (as A-H) for the UK.

    Oddly half the accompanying photos were of Scottish subjects which didn't really reflect the space Scotland took up in the essay, or even really the bits of Scotland to which the author travelled.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,146
    FF43 said:

    Aficionados of the State of the Union may find this piece interesting. Don't necessarily agree with it - muddling through can be the most effective approach - food for thought nevertheless on the possible imminent demise of the Union.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1478635488693080068

    Intderesting (though, possibly for space reasons, missing the point about the SNP not intervening in English domestic legislation, though presumably EVEL had been scrapped by the time he toured?).
  • kamskikamski Posts: 4,199
    pigeon said:

    On topic: The evidence of the last few weeks suggests that Omicron is essentially unstoppable at the population level, so there's no longer any point in trying to push the refusers into accepting the jabs (as a means of suppression and, by extension, a device to minimise the need for harmful restrictions to be imposed on other people, so as to alleviate the pressure on healthcare systems.) Indeed, it's ripping through the population in many countries, including both the UK and Italy, so fast that there is no time to offer reasonable protection to that portion of the remaining unvaccinated population who are going to catch Covid over the next few weeks, even if they change their minds. And if there's no longer a significant benefit to society to be had from imposing vaccination upon the remaining holdouts, then should governments be seeking to do it?

    I think there could be an argument for locking down the unvaccinated if that would slow the spread amongst those most likely to need hospital treatment, at least enough to keep the health system functioning. It kind of depends on what measures you would need to make a difference, but "unstoppable" is not the same as "unslowdownable". The first weeks of Omicron in Germany seem to show a doubling rate nearer 4 days, compared to the 2 days or so that was reported in the first weeks of Omicron in the UK (not sure if that held up?). If measures for unvaccinated push some people to get vaccinated that can only help, though I agree it's getting a bit late to give them a good level of protection.

    Meanwhile, Bremen, which has easily the highest official vaccination rate of any state in Germany, now also has easily the highest 7-day incidence rate - 713.7 (per 100000/7-days) compared to nationally 285.9

    Partly due to Omicron becoming dominant earlier in Bremen than in some other parts of Germany (probably because close to the Netherlands and Denmark). Probably partly due to the testing and reporting of testing in Bremen being less disrupted during the holidays than in most of Germany.

    Of course Bremen is small - it's still "only" 1330 new cases reported yesterday, and zero new deaths. But it's a good indication of where much of the rest of Germany will be sometime next week.

  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    Sandpit said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    Yes, it’s part of the system of trial by jury, that occasionally the twelve good men might choose to do their own thing, contrary to the evidence in front of them. It’s an important part of the system, that they have that option.
    No! Not contrary to the evidence. The evidence included the context. The context was key because the act was not in dispute. This wasn't an OJ Simpson type affair.
  • JosiasJessopJosiasJessop Posts: 38,517

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    I have recently migrated both my own and my son's WhatsApp accounts to a new number. Unless Peppa has created an entirely new profile which all of his contacts have to then change to, he has migrated his phone number.

    That's how WhatsApp works. So his assumption is that Lord Geidt doesn't know and won't check when he says something so obviously stupid.
    Well, it didn't work for me when changing it to the same number!
    Did you back up all chats first?
    Yep. In fact, I had several backups that I'd made in the previous three years that I'd had that phone (*). I could create backups from the old phone, but Whatsapp could not find them on the new, despite them being visible on the new phone. Part of me wonders if that was part of the problem. I didn't try for too long, as I don't use WhatsApp that much. I *think* I'd clicked all the correct permissions.

    (*) Yes, TSE, phones can remain usable for more than six months. ;)
  • eek said:

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    Yes it was Boris, even I had Boris Johnson's number going back to 2012.

    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


    Do you think Boris knew what he was doing with WhatsApp?

    As you say it gives you an option to do X and Y? Boris picked the option that looked best for him (which was probably the one that lost the messages given that he was trying to fix the issue people knowing his number)
    When you swap numbers, and you don't go that route I posted above, it gets you several warnings that your previous number is no longer registered to this phone, would you want to transfer over otherwise that chats and media will be permanently deleted, you, from memory, have to click that alert three times.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    kinabalu said:

    Sandpit said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    Yes, it’s part of the system of trial by jury, that occasionally the twelve good men might choose to do their own thing, contrary to the evidence in front of them. It’s an important part of the system, that they have that option.
    No! Not contrary to the evidence. The evidence included the context. The context was key because the act was not in dispute. This wasn't an OJ Simpson type affair.
    Plus and also you are only guilty of CD if you do stuff "without lawful excuse" so the jury is entitled to think there was no crime cos there was a lawful ex
  • Lest we forget this government has a history about lying about losing Whatsapp messages.

    The former health minister Lord Bethell admitted deleting texts and WhatsApp messages related to coronavirus testing contracts because he mistakenly thought there would be back-ups, disclosures show.

    Bethell, who had been appointed in March last year, was sacked in September’s reshuffle amid an investigation by the information commissioner into the use of private email by health ministers.

    Official guidance says ministers should use government systems, and if they use private channels, should ensure a record of these is provided to their department.

    Details of his personal phone use have emerged as part of a High Court challenge related to the award of £90 million coronavirus testing contracts made by the Good Law Project.

    In a witness statement signed by Bethell as part of the proceedings, he explained that three previous explanations he had given as to why messages could be produced to the court had been mistaken.

    He had apparently claimed that he could not produce them because the handset had been “lost”, according to letters from the government’s legal department. A few days later, Bethell said instead that his phone was “broken” or “defective”.

    Finally, in a meeting with lawyers, he said that was wrong, and he had given the phone to a member of his family.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-contracts-lord-bethell-thought-deleted-messages-were-backed-up-gpd6tf65j
  • The BBC have a report on Serbs reaction to novax being detained along with this photo of a mural....I thought that Ronaldo statue was bad...

    https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/live-experience/cps/624/cpsprodpb/vivo/live/images/2022/1/6/5bed7c8a-59b8-4253-8650-7b6942439f51.jpg
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004
    Covid anecdote. My mother who is on the clinically vulnerable has said she has been contacted to arrange getting an in-home PCR test kit to has available to use if she gets symptoms. She believes the idea is that if a positive result is shown that they will be immediately sent one of the new Covid anti-viral treatments to start taking. This seems like a very sensible system to setup in my view and likely have a massive impact on reducing hospitalisations.

    Also from the same source some German Covid anecdata from a friend of hers who is a teacher in Germany. This friend is really into alternative therapies and has been against Covid vaccinations. She has now been "forced against her will" to have one due to not being able to do almost anything without having been jabbed. She also reports there have been scuffles in her school between the vaccination and un-vaccinated secondary school kids.
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578
    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    It was easy peasy. I duly condemned all tyranny and slavery and thus earned my right to also condemn ours. But pls bookmark this post so I don't have to always preface any negative comment about our colonial crimes with a reference to lots of other stuff that we didn't do. Time saver.

    As for the statue, what they did wasn't criminal. So said the jury. I'd like you to say that back to me to show you really do accept it. Least you can do, Ed, after what I've just done.
    Haha Kinablu, ok I will. It wasn't criminal because the jury said it wasn't.

    And yes I promise.
    ... said it wasn't having heard the evidence and considered the context.

    But, ok, good enough. Your response to any future posts of mine which are critical of our colonialism and its legacy will not be to accuse me of turning a blind eye to other things.

    You'll have to come up with a different line of crap. This is progress.
    Deal. And I expect not to be called a supporter of insurrection or even an anti-vaxxer as I was by one poster because I said I would have voted for Trump. Fair enough?

  • Lest we forget this government has a history about lying about losing Whatsapp messages.

    The former health minister Lord Bethell admitted deleting texts and WhatsApp messages related to coronavirus testing contracts because he mistakenly thought there would be back-ups, disclosures show.

    Bethell, who had been appointed in March last year, was sacked in September’s reshuffle amid an investigation by the information commissioner into the use of private email by health ministers.

    Official guidance says ministers should use government systems, and if they use private channels, should ensure a record of these is provided to their department.

    Details of his personal phone use have emerged as part of a High Court challenge related to the award of £90 million coronavirus testing contracts made by the Good Law Project.

    In a witness statement signed by Bethell as part of the proceedings, he explained that three previous explanations he had given as to why messages could be produced to the court had been mistaken.

    He had apparently claimed that he could not produce them because the handset had been “lost”, according to letters from the government’s legal department. A few days later, Bethell said instead that his phone was “broken” or “defective”.

    Finally, in a meeting with lawyers, he said that was wrong, and he had given the phone to a member of his family.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-contracts-lord-bethell-thought-deleted-messages-were-backed-up-gpd6tf65j

    'This is government by burner phone and an absolute racket'
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited January 2022
    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.
    Hospitals there are buckling because it's worse.
    (2/2).

    https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479075865237594114?s=20

    The NW has constantly been hard hit.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    Dura_Ace said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    I thought you were on my side! Your one of THEM 🙁
    Ha ha, no, sorry, I have been one of THEM for almost 35 years but I have a sense of humour. 😜
    Can you not smell this bacon I have frying, calling you like a religious calling?

    Anointed now with Daddies Sauce

    Come back to the light. It says.
    Bacon is the toughest, but I am strong. I can even fry it for my kids without eating it.
    Bacon is practically poison anyway. Leaving aside the atrocity of treating the animal like shit and killing it.
    Agreed on all counts, which is why I don't eat it and buy it only after extremely pronounced lobbying.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    eek said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    🚨 Scoop: Boris Johnson has told Lord Geidt he did not reveal WhatsApp messages about the Downing Street flat refurb loan due to a new phone:

    "The PM has told Geidt that he did not see the WhatsApp messages because he changed his phone number"

    https://www.ft.com/content/0e07461f-6d19-4831-9cbe-bb7588351f56

    Thats not how WhatsApp works Boris...
    Yes it is. It’s tied to your phone number.
    Also - presumably easy to verify??
    When you set up an account, or move your account to a new device on the same number, it sends you an SMS to verify.
    Actually, I had a problem a few months back. I changed to a new phone with the same number, and whilst WhatsApp registered correctly, numerous attempts to backup WhatsApp data off the old phone onto the new have failed. Fortunately I only have a couple of little-used groups on WhatsApp, but I did lose all the data and those groups.

    No idea what went wrong, or whether I did anything wrong.
    The only reliable way I have found for this, is to backup to a cloud service, setup the new phone, then restore the backup. Groups are a special case, because the encryption key is different for the new device, and won’t be shared with everyone in the group.
    https://faq.whatsapp.com/android/chats/how-to-restore-your-chat-history/?lang=en

    Long thread here https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/74973/transfer-whatsapp-chat-history-to-new-device
    The gist of it, is that this is a consumer application not an enterprise application, and there’s no support for it.
    Thanks. Good to know it wasn't me being too stoopid.
    It is an utterly seamless process on iPhones.

    Just back up to iCloud and switch over to your new phone and there it is.

    As an aside the quick start transferring entire iPhones to a new one is brilliant.

    I transferred 400GB in around an hour, all the apps and stuff worked straight away.
    The issue wasn't that Boris got a new phone, it was he got a new number.

    Was it Boris whose number was discovered to be in the public domain due to putting it on a post or article years ago or was that another Minister / MP? The timing fits perfectly for Boris needing to rapidly getting a new phone number.
    Yes it was Boris, even I had Boris Johnson's number going back to 2012.

    I've transferred numbers on WhatsApp without losing previous messages, it gives you an option the moment you put a new sim in, or you can just go into the WhatsApp settings.


    Do you think Boris knew what he was doing with WhatsApp?

    As you say it gives you an option to do X and Y? Boris picked the option that looked best for him (which was probably the one that lost the messages given that he was trying to fix the issue people knowing his number)
    When you swap numbers, and you don't go that route I posted above, it gets you several warnings that your previous number is no longer registered to this phone, would you want to transfer over otherwise that chats and media will be permanently deleted, you, from memory, have to click that alert three times.
    Once again, we are talking about a technophobe (Boris) being asked a question that he doesn't understand?

    Have you never had to spend 30 minutes using multiple different analogies / examples / stories to get a client to understand something that is perfectly obvious to you and everyone else in the room?

    That client is Boris.
  • FrancisUrquhartFrancisUrquhart Posts: 76,274
    edited January 2022
    AlistairM said:

    Covid anecdote. My mother who is on the clinically vulnerable has said she has been contacted to arrange getting an in-home PCR test kit to has available to use if she gets symptoms. She believes the idea is that if a positive result is shown that they will be immediately sent one of the new Covid anti-viral treatments to start taking. This seems like a very sensible system to setup in my view and likely have a massive impact on reducing hospitalisations.

    My elderly parents have been also contacted over this.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912

    Lest we forget this government has a history about lying about losing Whatsapp messages.

    The former health minister Lord Bethell admitted deleting texts and WhatsApp messages related to coronavirus testing contracts because he mistakenly thought there would be back-ups, disclosures show.

    Bethell, who had been appointed in March last year, was sacked in September’s reshuffle amid an investigation by the information commissioner into the use of private email by health ministers.

    Official guidance says ministers should use government systems, and if they use private channels, should ensure a record of these is provided to their department.

    Details of his personal phone use have emerged as part of a High Court challenge related to the award of £90 million coronavirus testing contracts made by the Good Law Project.

    In a witness statement signed by Bethell as part of the proceedings, he explained that three previous explanations he had given as to why messages could be produced to the court had been mistaken.

    He had apparently claimed that he could not produce them because the handset had been “lost”, according to letters from the government’s legal department. A few days later, Bethell said instead that his phone was “broken” or “defective”.

    Finally, in a meeting with lawyers, he said that was wrong, and he had given the phone to a member of his family.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-contracts-lord-bethell-thought-deleted-messages-were-backed-up-gpd6tf65j

    'This is government by burner phone and an absolute racket'
    Ooh can we re-litigate the great burner phone debate?
  • MrEdMrEd Posts: 5,578

    MrEd said:

    kinabalu said:

    Morning all, on the Colston verdicts:

    The removal of the statue was a good thing - we shouldn't be celebrating that shameful aspect of our history - and my natural reluctance to second-guess jury verdicts goes unchallenged here.

    And now to burnish this opinion of mine with the balance, moral gravitas and historical context it is so clearly crying out for. Here we go:

    I condemn Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and all other leftist tyrants. In fact I condemn tyrants of any ilk. I have no time for them - tyrants.

    There is a goodly long list of people & civilizations throughout history who were both not British and have profited from the enslaving of others. I'll just mention the Romans but gosh one could go on.

    Is that ok?

    Spot on.

    Ps it still was criminal damage by the definition of the law but you have to accept all jury verdicts if you believe in the system
    They were charged with criminal damage. A due process (trial by jury) found them not guilty. Ergo, whatever they did was not criminal damage.
    Correct - I should have prefixed my comment by saying "PS I believe..."
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851

    On Djokovic, I see it was discussed here earlier but I didn't notice the crucial detail that I heard on the radio mentioned. Apologies if I missed it, but..

    The State rule for domestic travel to Victoria is that you can have been previously infected, rather than vaccinated. Apparently all that Djokovic has is "proof" that he's been infected.

    The Federal rule for entering Australia has no such exemption. You have to prove that you are unable to be vaccinated. It's quite clear that any State rules are in addition.

    "Proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons when coming to Australia
    If you are coming to Australia and have a medical contraindication recorded in the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) you can show an Australian COVID-19 digital certificate to airline staff. You can otherwise show your immunisation history statement.

    If you do not have your medical contraindication recorded in the AIR you will need to show airline staff a medical certificate that indicates you are unable to be vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine because of a medical condition. The medical certificate must be in English and include the following information:

    your name (this must match your travel identification documents)
    date of medical consultation and details of your medical practitioner
    details that clearly acknowledge that you have a medical condition which means you cannot receive a COVID-19 vaccination (vaccination is contraindicated).
    Airlines are responsible for ensuring your proof meets these requirements.

    People who have received non-TGA approved or recognised vaccines should not be certified in this category and cannot be treated as vaccinated for the purposes of their travel.

    You should check any requirements, particularly quarantine and post-arrival testing requirements, in the state or territory to which you are travelling as this will impact your travel arrangements.

    If you are planning on traveling onwards to or through a different state or territory when you arrive in Australia, you need to check domestic travel restrictions. States and territories can apply their own travel restrictions.

    You are responsible for complying with travel restrictions and requirements that apply to you. Please note: proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons is separate to a Commissioner’s travel exemption."
    https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/vaccinated-travellers#toc-6

    I'm sure they won't let him in. He might be able to sue his airline.

    My reading is the Federal has overrode the State in this one case for political reasons. Djokovic is getting special treatment. Special *adverse* treatment. It's a misuse of power imo but I'd think it has sufficient technical validity to stand. We'll see. It's potentially a big problem for Djokovic longer term because countries other than Oz might take a similar approach.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    AlistairM said:

    Covid anecdote. My mother who is on the clinically vulnerable has said she has been contacted to arrange getting an in-home PCR test kit to has available to use if she gets symptoms. She believes the idea is that if a positive result is shown that they will be immediately sent one of the new Covid anti-viral treatments to start taking. This seems like a very sensible system to setup in my view and likely have a massive impact on reducing hospitalisations.

    My elderly parents have been also contacted over this.
    I was wondering how they were going to get the tests done in time to allow treatment to start early enough.

    And that seems like a very sensible plan.

    take LFT test, if positive take PCR test and place in post. result next day go and collect anti-virals.
  • eek said:

    AlistairM said:

    Covid anecdote. My mother who is on the clinically vulnerable has said she has been contacted to arrange getting an in-home PCR test kit to has available to use if she gets symptoms. She believes the idea is that if a positive result is shown that they will be immediately sent one of the new Covid anti-viral treatments to start taking. This seems like a very sensible system to setup in my view and likely have a massive impact on reducing hospitalisations.

    My elderly parents have been also contacted over this.
    I was wondering how they were going to get the tests done in time to allow treatment to start early enough.

    And that seems like a very sensible plan.

    take LFT test, if positive take PCR test and place in post. result next day go and collect anti-virals.
    If I remember what my folks said over Whatsapp ( I didn't see them over Christmas), your test is sent via special priority post, with the plan being exactly this.
  • Lest we forget this government has a history about lying about losing Whatsapp messages.

    The former health minister Lord Bethell admitted deleting texts and WhatsApp messages related to coronavirus testing contracts because he mistakenly thought there would be back-ups, disclosures show.

    Bethell, who had been appointed in March last year, was sacked in September’s reshuffle amid an investigation by the information commissioner into the use of private email by health ministers.

    Official guidance says ministers should use government systems, and if they use private channels, should ensure a record of these is provided to their department.

    Details of his personal phone use have emerged as part of a High Court challenge related to the award of £90 million coronavirus testing contracts made by the Good Law Project.

    In a witness statement signed by Bethell as part of the proceedings, he explained that three previous explanations he had given as to why messages could be produced to the court had been mistaken.

    He had apparently claimed that he could not produce them because the handset had been “lost”, according to letters from the government’s legal department. A few days later, Bethell said instead that his phone was “broken” or “defective”.

    Finally, in a meeting with lawyers, he said that was wrong, and he had given the phone to a member of his family.


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/covid-contracts-lord-bethell-thought-deleted-messages-were-backed-up-gpd6tf65j

    'This is government by burner phone and an absolute racket'
    Ooh can we re-litigate the great burner phone debate?
    The combination of La Rayner and burner phones will cause various PB Tories to explode in a great ejaculation of rage and, well, something else.
  • kinabalu said:

    On Djokovic, I see it was discussed here earlier but I didn't notice the crucial detail that I heard on the radio mentioned. Apologies if I missed it, but..

    The State rule for domestic travel to Victoria is that you can have been previously infected, rather than vaccinated. Apparently all that Djokovic has is "proof" that he's been infected.

    The Federal rule for entering Australia has no such exemption. You have to prove that you are unable to be vaccinated. It's quite clear that any State rules are in addition.

    "Proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons when coming to Australia
    If you are coming to Australia and have a medical contraindication recorded in the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR) you can show an Australian COVID-19 digital certificate to airline staff. You can otherwise show your immunisation history statement.

    If you do not have your medical contraindication recorded in the AIR you will need to show airline staff a medical certificate that indicates you are unable to be vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine because of a medical condition. The medical certificate must be in English and include the following information:

    your name (this must match your travel identification documents)
    date of medical consultation and details of your medical practitioner
    details that clearly acknowledge that you have a medical condition which means you cannot receive a COVID-19 vaccination (vaccination is contraindicated).
    Airlines are responsible for ensuring your proof meets these requirements.

    People who have received non-TGA approved or recognised vaccines should not be certified in this category and cannot be treated as vaccinated for the purposes of their travel.

    You should check any requirements, particularly quarantine and post-arrival testing requirements, in the state or territory to which you are travelling as this will impact your travel arrangements.

    If you are planning on traveling onwards to or through a different state or territory when you arrive in Australia, you need to check domestic travel restrictions. States and territories can apply their own travel restrictions.

    You are responsible for complying with travel restrictions and requirements that apply to you. Please note: proof that you cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons is separate to a Commissioner’s travel exemption."
    https://covid19.homeaffairs.gov.au/vaccinated-travellers#toc-6

    I'm sure they won't let him in. He might be able to sue his airline.

    My reading is the Federal has overrode the State in this one case for political reasons. Djokovic is getting special treatment. Special *adverse* treatment. It's a misuse of power imo but I'd think it has sufficient technical validity to stand. We'll see. It's potentially a big problem for Djokovic longer term because countries other than Oz might take a similar approach.
    The Australian lawyer on the radio earlier was very clear on this: Federal always overrides State.

    Politicians will talk tough for political reasons, but the decision will have nothing to do with the politics.
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184
    edited January 2022

    I'm too busy to do more than occasionally dive in and out, but is much of the debate about Juries because of the Colson case?

    Juries can acquit for whatever reason they like. Its a demonstrable fact that the 4 tits pushed the statue into the water, but the jury have decided that it doesn't constitute criminal damage.

    Isn't that the whole point of a jury system? Or can we now expect Priti Vacant to try and abolish trial by jury? Mind you, with both mega cuts and Covid the legal system has defacto done so with so big a backlog...

    Your middle paragraph sums up my position entirely.
    I might have added a weary sigh, but that's all.

    *Edit* - Why the weary sigh, I ask myself. Clearly not because I'm keen for a big statue of a slaver in Bristol. Nor, if I'm honest, because I'd have rather the council had taken it down themselves - that is true, but doesn't elicit a weary sigh. The weary sigh is because the four tits are just so unbearably pleased with themselves. And you can't jail someone for that, no matter how much you'd like to.
  • ChrisChris Posts: 11,009

    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.

    The ONS figures for London that were reported suggested that infections were still increasing in the most recent week sampled, which is completely contrary to the test data, which show numbers plummeting in the corresponding week. Probably too early to show effects of mixing at Christmas and any post-Christmas changes of behaviour.

    Let's hope the decision-makers have access to better data than the public, but I wouldn't bet on it.

  • RogerRoger Posts: 18,891
    Dura_Ace said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    I thought you were on my side! Your one of THEM 🙁
    Ha ha, no, sorry, I have been one of THEM for almost 35 years but I have a sense of humour. 😜
    Can you not smell this bacon I have frying, calling you like a religious calling?

    Anointed now with Daddies Sauce

    Come back to the light. It says.
    Bacon is the toughest, but I am strong. I can even fry it for my kids without eating it.
    Bacon is practically poison anyway. Leaving aside the atrocity of treating the animal like shit and killing it.
    There was a very bizarre post on here yesterday from someone saying that a good reason for leaving the EU was Australian beef which was so delicious it was worth ignoring their lower animal welfare standards.

    That I'm afraid is what we Remainers are dealing with!
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.
    Hospitals there are buckling because it's worse.
    (2/2).

    https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479075865237594114?s=20

    The NW has constantly been hard hit.

    So far.....

    image
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 15,545

    FF43 said:

    Aficionados of the State of the Union may find this piece interesting. Don't necessarily agree with it - muddling through can be the most effective approach - food for thought nevertheless on the possible imminent demise of the Union.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1478635488693080068

    It was interesting if overly long. I'm assuming the demise of Britishness is a matter of some regret for the author? I thought the point that Britain is not a traditional country like most others was well made. Intriguing to speculate on who the person of Austro-Hungarian descent with the public profile who feared the same fate (as A-H) for the UK.

    Oddly half the accompanying photos were of Scottish subjects which didn't really reflect the space Scotland took up in the essay, or even really the bits of Scotland to which the author travelled.
    I would regret the passing of the Union. I actually have some empathy with those that mourned the loss of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I can see myself being that person.
  • The former Scottish National party MP Margaret Ferrier will stand trial in August accused of travelling from Glasgow to London in September 2020 knowing she had symptoms of coronavirus and wilfully exposing others to the risk of infection.

    Ferrier pleaded not guilty to the single charge on Thursday morning at Glasgow sheriff court.

    The Rutherglen and Hamilton West MP, who referred herself to the police and the parliamentary commissioner for standards , was immediately suspended from her party after the alleged rule-breaking came to light.

    She has clung to her position despite vociferous and ongoing calls for her to quit, including from the first minister and SNP leader, Nicola Sturgeon.


    https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/06/ex-snp-mp-margaret-ferrier-stand-trial-alleged-covid-breach?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
  • CookieCookie Posts: 11,184

    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.
    Hospitals there are buckling because it's worse.
    (2/2).

    https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479075865237594114?s=20

    The NW has constantly been hard hit.

    So far.....

    image
    Hospitalisations in London appearsto have peaked and is declining.

    Hospitalisations in the North West appears to be surpassing last winter's peak.

    Which is quite surprising - the impression I got from London was that pretty much everyone had it, but it certainly doesn't feel like that here. 'A lot of it about', certainly. But no worse than any cold in any winter.

    But perhaps that's because I don't know that many old people, and it's considerably worse for them.
  • FF43 said:

    FF43 said:

    Aficionados of the State of the Union may find this piece interesting. Don't necessarily agree with it - muddling through can be the most effective approach - food for thought nevertheless on the possible imminent demise of the Union.

    https://mobile.twitter.com/TomMcTague/status/1478635488693080068

    It was interesting if overly long. I'm assuming the demise of Britishness is a matter of some regret for the author? I thought the point that Britain is not a traditional country like most others was well made. Intriguing to speculate on who the person of Austro-Hungarian descent with the public profile who feared the same fate (as A-H) for the UK.

    Oddly half the accompanying photos were of Scottish subjects which didn't really reflect the space Scotland took up in the essay, or even really the bits of Scotland to which the author travelled.
    I would regret the passing of the Union. I actually have some empathy with those that mourned the loss of the Austro-Hungarian empire. I can see myself being that person.
    Mournful regret is quite a Scottish trait, I have a fair bit of it myself.
    I would regret your and others' regret, but I'm afraid the 2014 referendum and subsequent events have pretty much burnt out all regret I might have for the Union itself.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    Dura_Ace said:

    kamski said:

    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.
    Yes happy to explain. I am not normally obnoxious, perhaps towards my brother, but it’s fair of you to say I can come across as obnoxious when showing my strong dislike for vegetarians and vegans. I have no time for them. I’m not even ambivalent - in fact if they are forcing that insane diet on their children, making them all wan and sickly, they should be locked up.

    🥓🍔🥩🍗🍖🥘🍤🍳

    PS if I am talking to a vegetarian, Hitler was vegetarian: suck it down.
    Thanks for clearing it up. Is it just "vegetarians and vegans" you have a "strong dislike for", or is it anyone who follows any kind of diet? People who don't drink? People who don't put milk in their tea? People who have any kind of religious belief? People who wear their hair long?
    Don't feed the troll - even if it's only a vegan sausage roll.
    Did you mean to sound so poetic? 🙂
    It was an accidental rhyme, though I noticed it at the time.
    Anyway I must fly, bacon in a pan I must fry.
    I'm a vegetarian, like that famous Aryan - so I will find my niche, and finish off the quiche.
    I thought you were on my side! Your one of THEM 🙁
    Ha ha, no, sorry, I have been one of THEM for almost 35 years but I have a sense of humour. 😜
    Can you not smell this bacon I have frying, calling you like a religious calling?

    Anointed now with Daddies Sauce

    Come back to the light. It says.
    Bacon is the toughest, but I am strong. I can even fry it for my kids without eating it.
    Bacon is practically poison anyway. Leaving aside the atrocity of treating the animal like shit and killing it.
    Agreed on all counts, which is why I don't eat it and buy it only after extremely pronounced lobbying.
    You’ve gone up 110% in my estimation OLB that you feed your kids bacon. You are a truly balanced one of them.

    Everything Dura Ace said is true - but it’s also true bacon is delicious. 😋
  • RogerRoger Posts: 18,891
    Grant Shapps wants to bring in legislation to override juries!

    Who'd have thought.....
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415
    Cookie said:

    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.
    Hospitals there are buckling because it's worse.
    (2/2).

    https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479075865237594114?s=20

    The NW has constantly been hard hit.

    So far.....

    image
    Hospitalisations in London appearsto have peaked and is declining.

    Hospitalisations in the North West appears to be surpassing last winter's peak.

    Which is quite surprising - the impression I got from London was that pretty much everyone had it, but it certainly doesn't feel like that here. 'A lot of it about', certainly. But no worse than any cold in any winter.

    But perhaps that's because I don't know that many old people, and it's considerably worse for them.
    Younger v older population centres?

    Terrace Housing?

    Bingo? Whippets? Timothy Taylor’s Landlord?
  • FF43FF43 Posts: 15,545
    kjh said:

    OK I am going to ask what is probably an idiotic question but I'm struggling to get this gas prices issue. I understand why it happened in the first place but we have had it for a few months now and gas is a commodity type product and not (I believe) something that has a huge timeline in changing supply volumes so why is it still an issue? I appreciate the UK storage issue, but the price issue isn't unique to the UK.

    AIUI gas prices increased worldwide as Asia and Europe competed for LNG as the world restarted industrial boilers coming out of a Covid lull. Normally Europe would revert to Russian gas and leave the more expensive LNG to Asia in that situation. For reasons that are not quite clear, Western Europe is not buying Russian gas on the spot markets and only taking contracted amounts. Is that because Russia is deliberately withholding gas beyond what it is contracted to supply, or is it because the market price of that gas is too high and Western Europe is refusing to buy and instead is running down reserves?

    Despite not consuming much Russian gas the UK is in the same market as the rest of Europe for alternative supplies - Norwegian gas and LNG - and so pays the same prices.
  • MoonRabbitMoonRabbit Posts: 12,415

    Cookie said:

    The problem is that this Omicron picture is similar but *bigger*.
    Before we get ONS regional prevalences (tomorrow), reported cases per 100k will be an imperfect proxy, but they suggest the North is going past London's peak.
    Hospitals there are buckling because it's worse.
    (2/2).

    https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1479075865237594114?s=20

    The NW has constantly been hard hit.

    So far.....

    image
    Hospitalisations in London appearsto have peaked and is declining.

    Hospitalisations in the North West appears to be surpassing last winter's peak.

    Which is quite surprising - the impression I got from London was that pretty much everyone had it, but it certainly doesn't feel like that here. 'A lot of it about', certainly. But no worse than any cold in any winter.

    But perhaps that's because I don't know that many old people, and it's considerably worse for them.
    Younger v older population centres?

    Terrace Housing?

    Bingo? Whippets? Timothy Taylor’s Landlord?
    Scandalous really Timothy Taylor’s Landlord got a whopping PPE contract
This discussion has been closed.