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The LDs step up the tactical squeeze on LAB voters in Devon – politicalbetting.com

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  • MattWMattW Posts: 18,087

    IanB2 said:

    moonshine said:

    JonWC said:

    DavidL said:

    I remain stunned, as I was yesterday morning, that there was no proposal on the table by the management the day before a national strike that was going to cause serious economic damage to the nation. That struck me as a serious failure of duty. If that was brought about by government interference then Ministers deserve all the shellacking they are getting.

    Arguing about who did what and walked out of where yesterday is completely beside the point. The current legislation requires quite a complicated and time consuming process to be gone through by the union before the strike can be legally called. What has been happening in the last few weeks to reach a deal here? The answer seems to be nothing.

    Faced with no offer and 9% inflation a strike was inevitable. Labour MPs are right to support a workforce that is being treated so shabbily. But this is just the start. We are going to see this in almost every part of the public sector over the next few months as the government struggles with no money and staff struggle with the CoL crisis.

    The government seems unable to say that as a result of corona, and the actions taken to deal with it, we are all materially worse off. Who should be worst affected is partly a matter of political opinion and partly a function of the laws of economics.
    Also unable to say that because of Brexit, and the actions taken to implement a particularly damaging version of it, we are materially worse off.
    Contrast core goods inflation (goods ex food and energy) in the UK and the Euro Area - twice as high in the UK in April thanks to a weaker GBP post-Brexit and additional import costs associated with the trade barriers erected by leaving the single market.
    Brexit is making us all poorer but the government can't admit it.
    On Brexit Day GBPEUR traded at 1.19. It’s now 1.16 but as recently as a month so ago traded higher than 1.19. Pretty range bound really.

    If uk core inflation is higher relative to Europe, this most likely has far more to do with relative monetary easing and fiscal spunking during and after covid, albeit leaving a customs union of course increases friction in trade with the members of that custom union.
    That's being a bit naughty with the data, though, isn't it, given that the whole runup to the Brexit referendum depressed the currency. During the couple of years prior the £ ranged from €1.25-€1.4, and there seems little doubt that the currently depressed confidence in our currency owes a lot to our self imposed isolation.
    The biggest drop in Sterling relative to the dollar came at the end of 2008/start 2009. It dropped from 2.05 to 1.41 in very short order and has never recovered from there. It is why all these memes about oil prices vs petrol prices compared to 2008 are so stupid. They are not comparing like with like.
    Surely not comparing like with like is exactly the point?

    When you know that your target audience is that one, you are after rage-generation not accuracy or thinking :smile: .
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PivWY9wn5ps
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772

    DavidL said:

    Funny how "inclusion" only works one way.....

    THE words ‘women’ and ‘girls’ have been erased from a Scottish Government-backed advice leaflet teaching youngsters about periods.

    The taxpayer-funded Young Scot information instead calls women "those of us that have both our ovaries and a womb" and "half the world’s population".

    But information for males about puberty and their voice breaking refers to them as ‘men’ and boys’.


    https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/9038985/scots-government-backed-puberty-leaflet-women-girls-erased/

    The really frightening nonsense was the new statements that not all women menstruate. Not menstruating in a young woman in her teenage years needs medical intervention and these statements, designed to be inclusive of transgender women, were positively dangerous.
    Plenty of contraceptives stop menstruation completely.
    I (and many of my friends) are too old to have periods. Are we no longer women? Somebody should have told us! I am shocked!! :open_mouth:
    This is material that is addressed to teenage girls, not those past the menopause and not particularly those on prescriptions of contraceptives. A healthy young teenage girl who is not on contraceptives should be having periods and it is important that the reasons for not doing so are checked out. As others have pointed out this is about context and in this particular context these statements are potentially harmful.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    And more.

    This is from the subsection "Individualism" another flaw of whiteness and indicative of White Supremacist Culture

    Individualism is problematic because


    "Individualism shows up as:

    for white people: seeing yourselves and/or demanding to be seen as an individual and not as part of the white group"


    How dare these white people ask to be seen as individuals, rather than being characterised entirely by the colour of their skin


    "for white people: a belief that you are responsible for and are qualified to solve problems on your own"

    These stupid white people. who feel they can solve problems by themselves!

    Some of these are just bizarre. White supremacy in the form of "individualism" =

    "little or no ability to delegate work to others, micro-management"

    Yes, that's very *white*

    ??

    And, of course, we have the classic kernel of all Critical Race Theory. Here it is:

    "for white people: a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"

    Yes, all white people are racist, just by being white, and really trying to be non-racist doesn't cut it, I'm afraid
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    JonWC said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    This culture war shit of yours is so boring. The British economy is heading down the toilet thanks to Tory incompetence, no wonder you are so desperate to distract. Where are the answers on the Right? There are none. But oh look, maths in California has gone woke! Chicks with dicks in your toilet! Critical race theory is doubling the price of your weekly shop! Aslef is turning our kids gay! Brown people are coming in dinghies and Christmas is getting cancelled!
    Quite so. It is also important that we do THIS:

    "Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color"

    It's time the many thousands of famously gay Nigerian mathematicians we're brought back into the curriculum
    There's tons of influential black mathematicians in these categories today. It's not about bringing their work into the primary and secondary curriculum, it's about showing their faces and talking about their achievements, more as part of the history of science. Just like we talk about Mary Anning's story to kids when we introduce them to the fossil record. We choose the stories we tell, and it influences the way we see any academic discipline.

    As a slight tangent: one of the worst stories we tell is the "lone genius" (almost always a white guy).

    When in fact almost every great discoverer of the last 150 years or so was supported (technically) by dozens of people (let alone all the people that enabled him the privilege of doing the work in the first place).

    There's a great Stanford GR lecture series where an equation is derived quite simply and then the guy says "but if you want to calculate anything from that; turn to a nearby mathematician. Einstein almost certainly did none of those calculations himself, he had a whole team of people." (And in fact you'd probably turn to solver software today).
    This seems to be very typical of modern equality thinking in that it is factually incorrect.
    It's not far off accusing Einstein of benefiting from the cis-heteropatriarchy and white privilege, is it?

    This is where The Madness is currently taking us.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    In the case of train operators who are being directly dictated to by the DfT it is literally you can't hire staff or pay overtime. So within their budget they cannot properly operate the service they are contractually obliged to do (by edict of the DfT). Same with Network Rail staff.

    Its fine to say "operate within your budget". For a normal business that is fine and I absolutely agree. But when its a public service - trains, medical, teaching etc etc - where you have legal obligations for services they won't give you the money to provide, what is the solution?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    Have a look round the world. The supply of people prepared to work for the shittiest pay for the shittiest conditions seems a bit low.
  • Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    If the train companies want to head outwith the government structures, then they should head outwith those subsidiesstructures.
    This is what Rishi will be thinking.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    This is more boring than yesterday's chavs in Oldham getting rattled off taxi drivers material.
  • mwadamsmwadams Posts: 3,089
    edited June 2022
    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "


    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    I'm white, but I'm not a white supremacist, and I try to avoid white supremacist culture. I'd like to see the back of those other oppressions too (although I have yet to see a path forward that keeps the benefits of 'capitalism' and eliminates the negatives of post-war capitalist consumption and wealth concentration).

    White supremacists and passive white supremacist culture are indeed a toxic link in that mesh; especially in the USA. Conversely, the counter-white-western-supremacist argument keeps other odious people in power elsewhere; the problem is keeping the discourse in that space.

    A lot of what these "antidotes" are about is moving the argument (at an individual level) away from that dichotomy and into something more inclusive and supportive.

    Unfortunately, you seem to bring it straight back into the "conflict" and paint yourself (and myself) into the "villain" role equating white with the language of "white supremacist". And while there's a *little* bit of truth in it (and certainly, as I have said, there are anti-white-supremacist villains too), most of us are trying to be better than that. Including you, I believe.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    When I see the word trope I am always on the lookout for a bullshit argument. I don't think the claim being made is that a handful of illinois Nazis are responsible for the environment. It's the White Man in general
  • moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    In the case of train operators who are being directly dictated to by the DfT it is literally you can't hire staff or pay overtime. So within their budget they cannot properly operate the service they are contractually obliged to do (by edict of the DfT). Same with Network Rail staff.

    Its fine to say "operate within your budget". For a normal business that is fine and I absolutely agree. But when its a public service - trains, medical, teaching etc etc - where you have legal obligations for services they won't give you the money to provide, what is the solution?
    Operate within the budget or shut down.

    Trains aren't a public service, they have customers who buy tickets. Charge customers more if needed, or cut services, or shut down. Cut wages in real terms. Whatever it takes, that's management's job to resolve.

    There's plenty of solutions available without "give us more taxpayers money" as the sole solution.
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    The strikes are outrageous. Any reasonable person should condemn it. No-one is forced to work on the railways, there are employers crying out for staff. If people working there don't like their pay and conditions, they should get off their lazy arses and look for another job.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    No, it talks explicitly about "white people" all the way through



    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"


    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"

  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "


    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    It's interesting that you equate white supremacy and white people. White supremacy=bad. White people=not bad. Hope this helps.
    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"


    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    In the case of train operators who are being directly dictated to by the DfT it is literally you can't hire staff or pay overtime. So within their budget they cannot properly operate the service they are contractually obliged to do (by edict of the DfT). Same with Network Rail staff.

    Its fine to say "operate within your budget". For a normal business that is fine and I absolutely agree. But when its a public service - trains, medical, teaching etc etc - where you have legal obligations for services they won't give you the money to provide, what is the solution?
    Operate within the budget or shut down.

    Trains aren't a public service, they have customers who buy tickets. Charge customers more if needed, or cut services, or shut down. Cut wages in real terms. Whatever it takes, that's management's job to resolve.

    There's plenty of solutions available without "give us more taxpayers money" as the sole solution.
    The flip side is the government would have to remove the fair cap and let commuter fares float up to their (I believe it would be north of where it is at the moment) free market value.
    That's not the RMT's problem but some of their fellow travellers may not like it.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Westminster voting intention:

    LAB: 40% (-2)
    CON: 33% (-1)
    LDEM: 13% (+1)
    GRN: 5% (+1)
    REF: 5% (-2)

    via @RedfieldWilton, 19 Jun
    Chgs. w/ 15 Jun
    https://sotn.newstatesman.com/2022/03/britainpredicts/
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    We have record migration, and people are OK with it. Funny sort of racism, or closed door.

    If you're struggling to fill vacancies, maybe try not being a shit employer, expecting people to work for shit wages, with shit terms and conditions, and treating your employees as disposable and replaceable identikit pieces of shit?
    And don’t expect the government to subsidise your crap wages with tax credits.
  • moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    The strikes are outrageous. Any reasonable person should condemn it. No-one is forced to work on the railways, there are employers crying out for staff. If people working there don't like their pay and conditions, they should get off their lazy arses and look for another job.
    That's one option, but if people don't want to work, they shouldn't be forced to do so either, and people always have the right to strike and quite rightly too.

    Nobody is forced to use railways either. Customers could always be charged more to give a better service or pay more wages, so inconveniencing customers in a wage dispute absolutely can be appropriate. Rail customers never stop moaning about the cost of the railways, well part of that cost is paying for the staff providing you a service.

    But customers equally have the right to say "I'll find an alternative to rails then" leading to less money going to rails, meaning less money to pay staff wages, so it can be ultimately self-defeating to strike.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    Dim, Barty, muy dim.

    The people criticising racism you are talking about quite specifically claim that you are a racist white supremacist *simply by virtue of being white*, you can't not be.

    So either you agree with them and are a racist

    Or you disagree with their criticism of racism and are, by your own argument, a racist.

    See?
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
  • Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    I think he's saying he has EU workers who could do the job (for less money than UK workers no doubt) but he's not allowed to bring them in.

    No shit Sherlock, you're not allowed to just bring in minimum wage European workers to work in the UK anymore - pay a decent wage for UK workers instead.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    You can't keep wages down to minimum wage, if there isn't someone prepared to work for minimum wages.

    The solution to the train dispute is obvious. Recruit *all* the Ukrainian train drivers and make driving trains a minimum wage job. On zero hours contracts.
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
  • YBarddCwscYBarddCwsc Posts: 7,172
    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    This culture war shit of yours is so boring. The British economy is heading down the toilet thanks to Tory incompetence, no wonder you are so desperate to distract. Where are the answers on the Right? There are none. But oh look, maths in California has gone woke! Chicks with dicks in your toilet! Critical race theory is doubling the price of your weekly shop! Aslef is turning our kids gay! Brown people are coming in dinghies and Christmas is getting cancelled!
    Quite so. It is also important that we do THIS:

    "Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color"

    It's time the many thousands of famously gay Nigerian mathematicians we're brought back into the curriculum
    There's tons of influential black mathematicians in these categories today. It's not about bringing their work into the primary and secondary curriculum, it's about showing their faces and talking about their achievements, more as part of the history of science. Just like we talk about Mary Anning's story to kids when we introduce them to the fossil record. We choose the stories we tell, and it influences the way we see any academic discipline.

    As a slight tangent: one of the worst stories we tell is the "lone genius" (almost always a white guy).

    When in fact almost every great discoverer of the last 150 years or so was supported (technically) by dozens of people (let alone all the people that enabled him the privilege of doing the work in the first place).

    There's a great Stanford GR lecture series where an equation is derived quite simply and then the guy says "but if you want to calculate anything from that; turn to a nearby mathematician. Einstein almost certainly did none of those calculations himself, he had a whole team of people." (And in fact you'd probably turn to solver software today).
    GR is an exceptionally bad example.

    The creation of GR really is the best example ever of "lone genius" in science.

    If Einstein had never lived, we'd still be waiting for GR.

    Apart from Marcel Grossmann, I am not sure anyone had much of an influence on Einstein's thought.

    And what is this BS about "Einstein almost certainly did none of those calculations himself, he had a whole team of people."
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263


    The strikes are outrageous. Any reasonable person should condemn it. No-one is forced to work on the railways, there are employers crying out for staff. If people working there don't like their pay and conditions, they should get off their lazy arses and look for another job.

    You're coming quite close to the 19th century approach to industrial relations there. There's a long-established consensus that it's reasonable to strike if your representatives have tried to reach an agreed settlement and failed - trying to reopen that is a real can of worms. It reflects the fact that in many lines of work, there are no other employers - if the rail industry decided to stop employing signalmen who had been on strike then (a) we'd have loads of unemployable signalmen and (b) we'd have no trained signalmen in work and the network would shut down for months while new signalmen were trained. It's not like being in IT where you can switch from company A to company B at the drop of a hat.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    You got five likes for this bilge, which is a simple and provable lie. The document which @mwadams linked, which is now being filtered into the Californian education system (which is also now getting pushback), is riddled with multiple comments about White People as well as White Supremacy. White People are the problem, what with all their Supremacy. It's not hard to work out what is being said

  • Pulpstar said:

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    In the case of train operators who are being directly dictated to by the DfT it is literally you can't hire staff or pay overtime. So within their budget they cannot properly operate the service they are contractually obliged to do (by edict of the DfT). Same with Network Rail staff.

    Its fine to say "operate within your budget". For a normal business that is fine and I absolutely agree. But when its a public service - trains, medical, teaching etc etc - where you have legal obligations for services they won't give you the money to provide, what is the solution?
    Operate within the budget or shut down.

    Trains aren't a public service, they have customers who buy tickets. Charge customers more if needed, or cut services, or shut down. Cut wages in real terms. Whatever it takes, that's management's job to resolve.

    There's plenty of solutions available without "give us more taxpayers money" as the sole solution.
    The flip side is the government would have to remove the fair cap and let commuter fares float up to their (I believe it would be north of where it is at the moment) free market value.
    That's not the RMT's problem but some of their fellow travellers may not like it.
    That is absolutely fair yes. Customers should pay a fair amount for the fare, in order to pay the wages for the service they are getting.

    If the travellers don't like it, they shouldn't expect the service. If I don't pay enough for a service, I generally don't get it.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    Have a look round the world. The supply of people prepared to work for the shittiest pay for the shittiest conditions seems a bit low.
    Personally I would be happy with the government passing laws to compel the likes of Swissport and the airport companies they operate at to pay good wages. Landing fees would be increased but if that made airports functional again then great.

    This is a perfect example of where the market has failed. Instead of BR's simple "just pay more" solution they refuse to do so. Because if you are Shitport and have no viable competitor to take over your function at Gatwick then you can do what you want.

    Perhaps over time a new company willing to pay more will come along - and the vultures who own airports will become willing to pay more for their services. We can't wait. This isn't a supermarket where if its poor you shop elsewhere. Its an airport.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    edited June 2022

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    Banning strikes is anti democratic. So what you are saying is that you hate human rights and democracy okay
    Strikes should not be banned, there should be a fundamental right for people who don't want to work for an employer, not to work for them.

    But striking workers absolutely should be allowed to be sacked, or otherwise replaced, without notice or going through disciplinary procedures. Employers ought to be able to treat it as the equivalent of Gross Misconduct and terminate the employment contract immediately.

    If someone wishes not to work for an employer, that's their choice, and that should be respected. What shouldn't be their choice is preventing the employer from finding someone else to do the job instead then.
    Not sure what point you are making WRT this strike. You can't just fire signal centre staff and replace them with temps.

    And besides which Network Rail would probably be happy to reach an agreement. If they were allowed to actually negotiate by their owner.
    I'm not making any point about this strike, I couldn't give less of a fuck about this strike. Let them strike for years like the NUM did, who gives a shit? Not me.

    I was responding to a point of principle about strikes in general. I wholeheartedly agree with the principle people must be allowed to strike, but a problem in UK law is it is one-sided. Employees can strike, but firing them (as eg Reagan famously did with Air Traffic Controllers) is illegal until months of striking has passed.

    You ought to be able to strike if you want to, but decisions should have consequences and if someone else is wanting to work they ought to be able to do the job instead. We shouldn't have discontented bed blockers holding down the jobs but not doing them, if alternatives are available.

    Of course if no alternatives are available, because terms and conditions are shit, then the employer will need to improve terms and conditions, but that's always the case anyway.
    Alternatives - as in more staff - are what everyone recognises is needed. The government point blank refuses to allow the likes of Network Rail and the train operators to hire enough staff to be able to operate without overtime.

    So if your solution is hire more staff then great - you have removed a significant driver of the strikes and work to rule actions.
    Are they refusing to allow them to hire more staff, or are they refusing to increase the budget to do so while giving pay rises? 🤔

    They should hire whatever staff they can afford, and pay whatever wages they can afford, from the budget they have available to them. It isn't the government's job to give them a bigger budget.
    In the case of train operators who are being directly dictated to by the DfT it is literally you can't hire staff or pay overtime. So within their budget they cannot properly operate the service they are contractually obliged to do (by edict of the DfT). Same with Network Rail staff.

    Its fine to say "operate within your budget". For a normal business that is fine and I absolutely agree. But when its a public service - trains, medical, teaching etc etc - where you have legal obligations for services they won't give you the money to provide, what is the solution?
    Operate within the budget or shut down.

    Trains aren't a public service, they have customers who buy tickets. Charge customers more if needed, or cut services, or shut down. Cut wages in real terms. Whatever it takes, that's management's job to resolve.

    There's plenty of solutions available without "give us more taxpayers money" as the sole solution.
    I know you don't like trains but surely you know that the DfT won't let the rail companies increase ticket prices...

    The problem remains the DfT. The solution is to remove the DfT from the equation. Spin off Great British Railways as a state-owned commercial company like they have successfully in Germany, Belgium, Italy etc etc .
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    I think he's saying he has EU workers who could do the job (for less money than UK workers no doubt) but he's not allowed to bring them in.

    No shit Sherlock, you're not allowed to just bring in minimum wage European workers to work in the UK anymore - pay a decent wage for UK workers instead.
    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263
    mwadams said:



    I'm white, but I'm not a white supremacist, and I try to avoid white supremacist culture. I'd like to see the back of those other oppressions too (although I have yet to see a path forward that keeps the benefits of 'capitalism' and eliminates the negatives of post-war capitalist consumption and wealth concentration).

    White supremacists and passive white supremacist culture are indeed a toxic link in that mesh; especially in the USA. Conversely, the counter-white-western-supremacist argument keeps other odious people in power elsewhere; the problem is keeping the discourse in that space.

    A lot of what these "antidotes" are about is moving the argument (at an individual level) away from that dichotomy and into something more inclusive and supportive.

    Unfortunately, you seem to bring it straight back into the "conflict" and paint yourself (and myself) into the "villain" role equating white with the language of "white supremacist". And while there's a *little* bit of truth in it (and certainly, as I have said, there are anti-white-supremacist villains too), most of us are trying to be better than that. Including you, I believe.

    Really good post.
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    Have a look round the world. The supply of people prepared to work for the shittiest pay for the shittiest conditions seems a bit low.
    Personally I would be happy with the government passing laws to compel the likes of Swissport and the airport companies they operate at to pay good wages. Landing fees would be increased but if that made airports functional again then great.

    This is a perfect example of where the market has failed. Instead of BR's simple "just pay more" solution they refuse to do so. Because if you are Shitport and have no viable competitor to take over your function at Gatwick then you can do what you want.

    Perhaps over time a new company willing to pay more will come along - and the vultures who own airports will become willing to pay more for their services. We can't wait. This isn't a supermarket where if its poor you shop elsewhere. Its an airport.
    We absolutely can wait. The airports are private businesses, they need to make their decisions privately and fix their own bloody problems.

    If they're incapable of doing so, the businesses need to fail and then the assets of that business can be acquired for £1 or whatever it is in order to run it properly.

    Private businesses should not be bailed out, or picked as winners or losers by the state.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013
    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    Ryanair seem pretty much unaffected by the airline staffing issues. He is talking about staff at the airports. "Us" being the aviation industry. Remember that FekkerAir only make money by shouting passengers off the plane as quickly as possible to get the next lot onboard and the bags swapped over. Delays not just cost them money, they break their entire trading model.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited June 2022

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    I think he's saying he has EU workers who could do the job (for less money than UK workers no doubt) but he's not allowed to bring them in.

    No shit Sherlock, you're not allowed to just bring in minimum wage European workers to work in the UK anymore - pay a decent wage for UK workers instead.
    Ryanair wish to return to their old approach of:-

    Flight from cheap EU country -> London.
    London -> Belfast
    Belfast -> Glasgow
    Glasgow -> Bristol
    Bristol -> Belfast
    Belfast -> London
    London -> back to cheap EU country before starting again.

    All staffed by cheap EU staff.

    And that isn't possible since we left the EU.
  • Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    I think he's saying he has EU workers who could do the job (for less money than UK workers no doubt) but he's not allowed to bring them in.

    No shit Sherlock, you're not allowed to just bring in minimum wage European workers to work in the UK anymore - pay a decent wage for UK workers instead.
    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.
    Its not a problem because if people don't want to work, we don't live in an era of indentured servitude and they should never be compelled to work. But if they don't work, they shouldn't get paid, and employers should be able to replace striking workers if they can find alternatives (which might not be quick, cheap or easy of course, but that's their problem to deal with if they go down that path).

    Let supply and demand sort it out. Good employers paying good wages, operating good businesses should find good reliable staff who want to work.

    Let the lazy shits who don't want to work, not get paid, but they shouldn't expect much in the way of "benefits" for not working. And let shit employers who want people to work for shit pay fail to find staff and either need to clean up their act, or have nobody working for them and they go out of business.
  • RochdalePioneersRochdalePioneers Posts: 27,013

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    Have a look round the world. The supply of people prepared to work for the shittiest pay for the shittiest conditions seems a bit low.
    Personally I would be happy with the government passing laws to compel the likes of Swissport and the airport companies they operate at to pay good wages. Landing fees would be increased but if that made airports functional again then great.

    This is a perfect example of where the market has failed. Instead of BR's simple "just pay more" solution they refuse to do so. Because if you are Shitport and have no viable competitor to take over your function at Gatwick then you can do what you want.

    Perhaps over time a new company willing to pay more will come along - and the vultures who own airports will become willing to pay more for their services. We can't wait. This isn't a supermarket where if its poor you shop elsewhere. Its an airport.
    We absolutely can wait. The airports are private businesses, they need to make their decisions privately and fix their own bloody problems.

    If they're incapable of doing so, the businesses need to fail and then the assets of that business can be acquired for £1 or whatever it is in order to run it properly.

    Private businesses should not be bailed out, or picked as winners or losers by the state.
    1. Catastrophic economic impact of people and goods not being able to fly into Britain for months in your scenario
    2. Whoever was in government at the start of this wouldn't be at the end.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    How can they not be an attack on white people, when they talk about "the dangers of working with white people", the many character flaws of white people, and, especially, the innate racism of all white people, even those who strive to be non-racist?

    It says it clearly. If you're white, you are racist. End of debate


    At certain point this document ("written by a self conscious white woman in her late 30s") descends into a kind of surreal, Goebbels-esque racism, except with worship - rather than fear - of the Other

    See here:


    "Kenneth and I waited and watched as Black and Brown and a few white bodies of all shapes and sizes arrived and filled the metal folding chairs set in a circle inside the pale beige walls of the worn out meeting hall"

    Note the capitalisation of Black and Brown juxtaposed with "a few white bodies" (un capitalised). I'd hazard a guess this woman is a lefty crank, feasting on her own liberal guilt. Which is fine, she can go away and be mad, and we should not have to worry about her; but instead she is shaping, years later, part of the American education system
  • Nigel_ForemainNigel_Foremain Posts: 13,766


    The strikes are outrageous. Any reasonable person should condemn it. No-one is forced to work on the railways, there are employers crying out for staff. If people working there don't like their pay and conditions, they should get off their lazy arses and look for another job.

    You're coming quite close to the 19th century approach to industrial relations there. There's a long-established consensus that it's reasonable to strike if your representatives have tried to reach an agreed settlement and failed - trying to reopen that is a real can of worms. It reflects the fact that in many lines of work, there are no other employers - if the rail industry decided to stop employing signalmen who had been on strike then (a) we'd have loads of unemployable signalmen and (b) we'd have no trained signalmen in work and the network would shut down for months while new signalmen were trained. It's not like being in IT where you can switch from company A to company B at the drop of a hat.
    For a start they are not earning 19th century salaries/wages, they are not experiencing 19th century conditions . This is a political strike with phoney reasons. The rationale for the strike is as phoney as Putin's excuses for aggression (and funnily enough a number of the union bosses are Putin apologists). Most people are experiencing real cuts to income, they do not decide to inconvenience millions of other people in their negotiations. There are very few people who cannot find a way of retraining if they really don't like their job. Strikes as a method of negotiation are as antiquated as "company shops" and belong to the 19th century. The fact that you, and other members of the labour party are ready to endorse them show how out of date (or just plain Marxist) you are.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,836
    Just received a mailshot through the door begging me to come and work in prisons.
    Vast range of positions across all skills available.
    What pay rise should HM Prisons be offering to fill these posts?
    And who should fund it?
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    Have a look round the world. The supply of people prepared to work for the shittiest pay for the shittiest conditions seems a bit low.
    Personally I would be happy with the government passing laws to compel the likes of Swissport and the airport companies they operate at to pay good wages. Landing fees would be increased but if that made airports functional again then great.

    This is a perfect example of where the market has failed. Instead of BR's simple "just pay more" solution they refuse to do so. Because if you are Shitport and have no viable competitor to take over your function at Gatwick then you can do what you want.

    Perhaps over time a new company willing to pay more will come along - and the vultures who own airports will become willing to pay more for their services. We can't wait. This isn't a supermarket where if its poor you shop elsewhere. Its an airport.
    We absolutely can wait. The airports are private businesses, they need to make their decisions privately and fix their own bloody problems.

    If they're incapable of doing so, the businesses need to fail and then the assets of that business can be acquired for £1 or whatever it is in order to run it properly.

    Private businesses should not be bailed out, or picked as winners or losers by the state.
    1. Catastrophic economic impact of people and goods not being able to fly into Britain for months in your scenario
    2. Whoever was in government at the start of this wouldn't be at the end.
    1. Not really. If the business fails and goes into administration it can still continue to operate as a business pending it being flogged off to someone else and at that point the state could justifiably get involved to ensure continued operations and resolve problems but the old owners would be wiped out rather than bailed out.
    2. So frigging what? Though that's not guaranteed by any means, plenty of key businesses have gone into administration before without it leading to a fall in the government.
  • NickPalmerNickPalmer Posts: 21,263



    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.

    I've never actually encountered a railway staff member who looked lazy - unlike, say, shop assistants, some of whom do look as though they can't be bothered. I don't have any connections with the industry at all but I think it's pretty unpleasant that you call them ALL lazy c*nts. This isn't below-the-line Guido here - consider raising your game a bit? Or offer evidence.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    I think he's saying he has EU workers who could do the job (for less money than UK workers no doubt) but he's not allowed to bring them in.

    No shit Sherlock, you're not allowed to just bring in minimum wage European workers to work in the UK anymore - pay a decent wage for UK workers instead.
    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.
    Ah, so you believe in "British Lassitude"?

    The original "Oriental Lassitude" was the belief that the natives were lazy, since they seemed to think that working in the midday sun, in the tropics, for low wages was not optimal.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    moonshine said:

    moonshine said:

    Just a question, how are the Tories going to break the unions

    Pass primary legislation making strikes illegal for certain key industries, including but not limited to transport workers. If the ECHR blocks the application of that legislation, then leave the ECHR.

    I’m pretty fed up after all these years of Tory govt (7 years with a majority) that they’ve not bothered knocking this on the head. I know I’m not alone.
    If you make strikes illegal then you need a pretty robust independent system for pay arbitration, which government MUST accept recommendations from.
    That doesn’t sound beyond the wit of man to implement.
    But it is beyond the wit of man. The point, though hidden, of the use of bargaining muscle is to place one group of people at an advantage over other groups of people. The rhetoric of the trade union movement is solidarity. The reality is that it is part of the competitive activity of people to do the best you can for a particular group. Success in this comparatively disadvantages other groups. Compare train drivers and bus drivers; compare city bankers and physics teachers in state schools.

  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    Have you read The War on The West by Douglas Murray?

    I'm reading it now and he exposes this movement brilliantly, and how it's managed to capture so many highly educated people throughout the West. And he manages to be quite measured and fair throughout with all the evidence cited and referenced. For you to draw your own conclusions.

    The people that need to read his book the most never will. Because it's Douglas Murray.
    Indeed so


    I've got the book at home. I can't bring myself to read it as I think it will be too depressing, because accurate

    Also I try to read outside my comfort zone. I already KNOW Wokeness as it now presents itself, in too many places, is weird, perverse, immoral and dangerous
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
    Ryanair have a bad reputation at ripping off the customer with extra charges, but as far as I know, they have an excellent safety record.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
  • Beibheirli_CBeibheirli_C Posts: 7,981
    I see the Culture Warriors have turned up, so time for me to go and do other stuff

    Later peeps!
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620



    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.

    I've never actually encountered a railway staff member who looked lazy - unlike, say, shop assistants, some of whom do look as though they can't be bothered. I don't have any connections with the industry at all but I think it's pretty unpleasant that you call them ALL lazy c*nts. This isn't below-the-line Guido here - consider raising your game a bit? Or offer evidence.
    As to shop staff, their demeanour is generally a function of their employment conditions.

    Towards the end, in the local branch of one of the chains that went bust, the staff were like zombies. Minimum wage, poor conditions and the writing was on the wall for all to see.

    Some of the same people are working at the Waitrose that replaced it. They look and act completely differently.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
  • Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
    Ryanair have a bad reputation at ripping off the customer with extra charges, but as far as I know, they have an excellent safety record.
    Does it have a good reputation for paying those safety-critical roles a decent wage though?

    Or does it rely upon cheap labour from overseas to keep that safety record?

    If you want to hire professionals in the UK in safety-critical roles you need to pay them professional wages. That's not what he wants to do though it seems?
  • JonWCJonWC Posts: 285
    edited June 2022

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    This culture war shit of yours is so boring. The British economy is heading down the toilet thanks to Tory incompetence, no wonder you are so desperate to distract. Where are the answers on the Right? There are none. But oh look, maths in California has gone woke! Chicks with dicks in your toilet! Critical race theory is doubling the price of your weekly shop! Aslef is turning our kids gay! Brown people are coming in dinghies and Christmas is getting cancelled!
    Quite so. It is also important that we do THIS:

    "Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color"

    It's time the many thousands of famously gay Nigerian mathematicians we're brought back into the curriculum
    There's tons of influential black mathematicians in these categories today. It's not about bringing their work into the primary and secondary curriculum, it's about showing their faces and talking about their achievements, more as part of the history of science. Just like we talk about Mary Anning's story to kids when we introduce them to the fossil record. We choose the stories we tell, and it influences the way we see any academic discipline.

    As a slight tangent: one of the worst stories we tell is the "lone genius" (almost always a white guy).

    When in fact almost every great discoverer of the last 150 years or so was supported (technically) by dozens of people (let alone all the people that enabled him the privilege of doing the work in the first place).

    There's a great Stanford GR lecture series where an equation is derived quite simply and then the guy says "but if you want to calculate anything from that; turn to a nearby mathematician. Einstein almost certainly did none of those calculations himself, he had a whole team of people." (And in fact you'd probably turn to solver software today).
    GR is an exceptionally bad example.

    The creation of GR really is the best example ever of "lone genius" in science.

    If Einstein had never lived, we'd still be waiting for GR.

    Apart from Marcel Grossmann, I am not sure anyone had much of an influence on Einstein's thought.

    And what is this BS about "Einstein almost certainly did none of those calculations himself, he had a whole team of people."
    There are other stunning examples of the lone genius in the evolution of gravity theory.

    We would have waited a fair while for someone other than Newton to realise that gravity actually exists. It is not at all obvious that matter attracts matter even when you tell someone that it does. (Unlike say Natural Selection when once you have accepted that life changes it is kind of obvious that only successful organisms will endure.)

    The one I like best is Karl Schwartzschild who essentially derived the first exact non-trivial solution (a simple black hole) to the Einstein equations while serving on the Russian front, where one imagines the opportunities for collaboration were limited. He died months later.

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
    Ryanair have a bad reputation at ripping off the customer with extra charges, but as far as I know, they have an excellent safety record.
    What @Sandpit is referring to is the real job for the cabin staff - which is not pushing the trolley. They are there as safety staff - evacuation in the event of emergencies etc. The trolley pushing stuff is on basis of "while-you-are-here-you-might-as-well".

    This is why Cabin Staff *was* a well paid job on BA.
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    Asset prices for houses has very little to do with interest rates and is very much to do with supply and demand instead.

    House price earnings ratio rocketed in the 2000s not the 2010s, when base rate was around 6% - it has remained relatively stable since then, despite the fact that interest rates have been around 0% most of that time.

    Unsurprisingly if you add 300k population but don't add ~300k bedrooms per annum then you end up with house prices going up. Who could have guessed that?
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
    Ryanair have a bad reputation at ripping off the customer with extra charges, but as far as I know, they have an excellent safety record.
    Ryanair are indeed market leaders on safety and reliability. That will be an extra £8.99 if you have read this post though.
  • theakestheakes Posts: 839
    My reading of party workers comments was that things were a shade gloomy at the end of last week, but certainly since the weekend they been quite the opposite, yesterday appears to have been very good, but tomorrow .......
  • theakestheakes Posts: 839
    Sorry I was talking about Lib Dem party workers!!!
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Sandpit said:

    Sandpit said:

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    So he says that his company is “fully staffed”, but also that he needs to bring in foreign workers?
    No - it implies that they are fully staffed but those staff are not from the EU. The restriction reduces the pool of candidates that Ryanair can recruit from
    Oh well, so he can’t recruit Romanian cabin crew to work for minimum wage any more.

    Maybe he’ll have to start paying trained people in safety-critical roles a professional salary?
    Ryanair have a bad reputation at ripping off the customer with extra charges, but as far as I know, they have an excellent safety record.
    They have an okay safety record, mostly down to new aircraft and experienced captains.

    The rest of the staff are nickel-and-dimed as much as the customers - using various self-employed schemes, zero-hours contracts, charges for uniforms, airport transport, meals on duty etc etc. Co-pilots even get charged (£25k?) for their 737 type rating (which the company sees as a profit centre), check rides and flight manuals. They’re a horrible company to work for, but people want to do what is still somehow perceived as a glamourous job for a few years.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,083
    theakes said:

    My reading of party workers comments was that things were a shade gloomy at the end of last week, but certainly since the weekend they been quite the opposite, yesterday appears to have been very good, but tomorrow .......

    It was nice of Liz to get the stories about the clown trying to lever his girlfriend into top jobs back into the press this week....
  • kinabalukinabalu Posts: 38,851
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom

    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    No, it talks explicitly about "white people" all the way through

    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"

    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"

    It's your *passion* on this that is so striking. It's as if you think that the notion of there being an ingrained sense of white superiority in many parts of the world is utterly ludicrous. Whereas to me it would be quite surprising - given the importance over such a long time of colonialism in shaping people and events - if there wasn't.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343
    Stereodog said:

    I’m a bit disappointed by this strike as far as Thameslink goes. I was counting on it to get me out of a concert I didn’t want to go to and so far trains are running twice an hour as usual.

    One of the few merits of Covid is that its judicious application gets you out of everything you don't want to do, and it's available even on no strike days.

  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    House prices are a function of

    - not building houses to match the rising population
    - pumping money into the economy
    - nearly all other possessions declining in value
    - ignoring house price inflation as not inflation

    The house prices are a symptom - the money "found" the scarce item, as it were.

    Even if housing wasn't inflated, though, keeping swathes of the economy in the minimum-wage-topped-up-with-benefits box was not politically sustainable.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    Have you read The War on The West by Douglas Murray?

    I'm reading it now and he exposes this movement brilliantly, and how it's managed to capture so many highly educated people throughout the West. And he manages to be quite measured and fair throughout with all the evidence cited and referenced. For you to draw your own conclusions.

    The people that need to read his book the most never will. Because it's Douglas Murray.
    Indeed so


    I've got the book at home. I can't bring myself to read it as I think it will be too depressing, because accurate

    Also I try to read outside my comfort zone. I already KNOW Wokeness as it now presents itself, in too many places, is weird, perverse, immoral and dangerous
    You should read it. It's very good.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom




    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Ironically of course it is now East Asians who are best at Maths, not whites anyway
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    House prices are a function of

    - not building houses to match the rising population
    - pumping money into the economy
    - nearly all other possessions declining in value
    - ignoring house price inflation as not inflation

    The house prices are a symptom - the money "found" the scarce item, as it were.

    Even if housing wasn't inflated, though, keeping swathes of the economy in the minimum-wage-topped-up-with-benefits box was not politically sustainable.
    Exactly. Supply and demand means money goes to rare items, and houses haven't kept up with population growth, so they're rare.

    If we'd been building more houses than population growth, then houses wouldn't be rare, and that money would have ended up in gold, or art work, or other assets instead of homes.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Labour's deputy leader backs the rail strikes saying the unions have been 'left with no choice'. Not sure that's the official line... https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/1539166668584255489
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    Leon said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
    Ain't that the truth.

    I get far more measured and interesting observations from black colleagues who manage to share with me how different their experiences can be, and their desire for change, but express no desire for revenge or to smash the system.
  • wooliedyedwooliedyed Posts: 6,841
    edited June 2022
    theakes said:

    My reading of party workers comments was that things were a shade gloomy at the end of last week, but certainly since the weekend they been quite the opposite, yesterday appears to have been very good, but tomorrow .......

    Thats what they say at every by election. The old 'change on the ground over the last few days' phooey
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248
    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom

    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    No, it talks explicitly about "white people" all the way through

    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"

    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"

    It's your *passion* on this that is so striking. It's as if you think that the notion of there being an ingrained sense of white superiority in many parts of the world is utterly ludicrous. Whereas to me it would be quite surprising - given the importance over such a long time of colonialism in shaping people and events - if there wasn't.
    I don't believe white people are intrinsically and irreversibly racist, and anyone that teaches that to my white daughters will get a REDACTED

    I am off to Armenia's third most interesting monastery in a moment, but before I go, one final thought

    Even if the Culture Wars bore you (they shouldn't), even if you think Wokeness is harmless or imaginary (it isn't) this should absolutely compel everyone on this forum, because it really is shaping American politics. Important elections have already been won and lost over this (Virginia, California) and the issue is only growing in salience

    It is not implausible to say that this madness could push Trump over the line, and into power in 2024. And that should concern the whole world

    Later
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    IanB2 said:

    It was nice of Liz to get the stories about the clown trying to lever his girlfriend into top jobs back into the press this week....

    BoZo managed to get it from a single story on page 5 of one paper, to International news.

    Pillock.


  • Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.

    I've never actually encountered a railway staff member who looked lazy - unlike, say, shop assistants, some of whom do look as though they can't be bothered. I don't have any connections with the industry at all but I think it's pretty unpleasant that you call them ALL lazy c*nts. This isn't below-the-line Guido here - consider raising your game a bit? Or offer evidence.
    It shows the mind set of the out of touch end of the modern tory party. There's a bit of an employment revolution starting, perhaps the only benefit of the brexit vote. The pool of people willing to work in horrible jobs for crap pay is fast drying up. I retired from the Fire Service at Christmas and since then, I've had numerous ex colleagues and friends offering me jobs. I could walk into a job at East Midlands Airport this afternoon if I wanted- baggage handling, fuel delivery, security and any number of jobs working for contractors that provide services up there. Fortunately, I'm in the lucky position where I don't need it, but the fact that they can't fill these low paid jobs speaks volumes. Good luck to the "lazy c*nts" I say.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    Asset prices for houses has very little to do with interest rates and is very much to do with supply and demand instead.

    House price earnings ratio rocketed in the 2000s not the 2010s, when base rate was around 6% - it has remained relatively stable since then, despite the fact that interest rates have been around 0% most of that time.

    Unsurprisingly if you add 300k population but don't add ~300k bedrooms per annum then you end up with house prices going up. Who could have guessed that?
    It is certainly true that, outside prime London real estate and student areas, housing demand is closely related to the availability and cost of mortgage finance. If banks had stuck to only ever lending 3x a single salary as a mortgage, then house prices would be lower than they are now because of a lack of demand.

    Of course, you are right that all solutions require extensive housebuliding - unless, as someone suggested yesterday, you encourage mass emigration and kicking your parents out of the house they’ve lived for 30 years.
  • StereodogStereodog Posts: 395
    algarkirk said:

    Stereodog said:

    I’m a bit disappointed by this strike as far as Thameslink goes. I was counting on it to get me out of a concert I didn’t want to go to and so far trains are running twice an hour as usual.

    One of the few merits of Covid is that its judicious application gets you out of everything you don't want to do, and it's available even on no strike days.

    Normally I’d agree but not when it’s your husband who wants to go. They can list all of the times you ignored COVID concerns for something you wanted to do 😉
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    I agree with much of that.

    The vast majority of our problems are longstanding domestic ones and domestic policy is far more important than anything else.
  • Leon said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
    So crucial, the only person who ever seems to mention any of those names is . . . you.

    If it weren't for you, I'd never have heard of Robin de Angelo etc, so not especially crucial.

    Seems to be a modern day equivalent of Noam Chomsky trying to end capitalism, which didn't exactly get far. Why not just ignore her and let her be niche rather than constantly magnifying what she has to say?
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    Leon said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
    Ain't that the truth.

    I get far more measured and interesting observations from black colleagues who manage to share with me how different their experiences can be, and their desire for change, but express no desire for revenge or to smash the system.
    Yes, a lot of the Marxism is being driven primarily by rich white people, on behalf of black people who often don’t support their wider aims.

    The real hatred is reserved for black Conservatives, people like commentator Candace Owens, and politician Larry Elder - described as “The Black Face Of White Supremacy” when he ran for Governor of California.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,165

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    I agree with much of that.

    The vast majority of our problems are longstanding domestic ones and domestic policy is far more important than anything else.
    I'd have voted Remain had there been a commitment to get interest rates to 2.0% by the end of 2018.
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454

    Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    Asset prices for houses has very little to do with interest rates and is very much to do with supply and demand instead.

    House price earnings ratio rocketed in the 2000s not the 2010s, when base rate was around 6% - it has remained relatively stable since then, despite the fact that interest rates have been around 0% most of that time.

    Unsurprisingly if you add 300k population but don't add ~300k bedrooms per annum then you end up with house prices going up. Who could have guessed that?
    We have been through the idea that asset prices have little to do with interest rates at least a couple of times before so have no interest in doing so again. Such a view is just economically illiterate.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    Scott_xP said:

    Labour's deputy leader backs the rail strikes saying the unions have been 'left with no choice'. Not sure that's the official line... https://twitter.com/AngelaRayner/status/1539166668584255489

    Probably is now the train companies are saying they can't negotiate because Shapps won't let them.
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,836
    edited June 2022



    Problem with your "British jobs for British workers" mantra is that a large number of the lazy c*nts don't want to work, and a lot of them have good well paid jobs and yet decide they want to go on strike.

    I've never actually encountered a railway staff member who looked lazy - unlike, say, shop assistants, some of whom do look as though they can't be bothered. I don't have any connections with the industry at all but I think it's pretty unpleasant that you call them ALL lazy c*nts. This isn't below-the-line Guido here - consider raising your game a bit? Or offer evidence.
    It shows the mind set of the out of touch end of the modern tory party. There's a bit of an employment revolution starting, perhaps the only benefit of the brexit vote. The pool of people willing to work in horrible jobs for crap pay is fast drying up. I retired from the Fire Service at Christmas and since then, I've had numerous ex colleagues and friends offering me jobs. I could walk into a job at East Midlands Airport this afternoon if I wanted- baggage handling, fuel delivery, security and any number of jobs working for contractors that provide services up there. Fortunately, I'm in the lucky position where I don't need it, but the fact that they can't fill these low paid jobs speaks volumes. Good luck to the "lazy c*nts" I say.
    Spot on.
    Hence the prison flyer I just received.
    I note no one has answered what level of pay increases are needed to retain and recruit there. Nor who ought to fund it.
    Incidentally. I mentioned the other day a tentative inquiry about supply teaching. Just received an email offering me work in recruitment, a job I have singularly no experience whatsoever.
    So, not only can they not find supply teachers. They can find anyone to find supply teachers either.
  • Scott_xP said:

    Boss of @Ryanair, O'Leary: "This gov't couldn't run a sweet shop. We are fully staffed. But we are hide-bound and hamstrung by a gov't so desperate to show #Brexit has been a success, when it's been an abject failure, it won't allow us to bring in EU workers to do these jobs."~AA https://twitter.com/BestForBritain/status/1539170022295277568/video/1

    And this is the question: Why isn't our managed migration regime bringing in people to fill the vacancies that can't otherwise be filled?

    I know that people say "it isn't racist to manage our borders". And it isn't. Unless the outcome is "no forriners at all except the rich ones".

    Points-based migration system my arse. We shut the door and won't open it.
    I can tell a post is yours, without scrolling up, just from the use of the word 'forriners'.

    Immigration is running higher right now than it has for many years by and large with public support. So this thesis doesn't stand up to scrutiny, I'm afraid.
    Great! So why can't we fill any of these posts?
    It is government policy to be liberal on high wage immigration but restrictive on low wage immigration.
    Shame the government has responsibility for providing essential services that rely on both high wage and low wage people working together then.
    The government could choose to be ultra liberal on all types of immigration, but, that wouldn't be a free lunch and would risk causing other social problems.
    It does not need to be ultra liberal, but it would help if it took into consideration the real needs of our economy based on our demographics and a very rich cohort of 50 somethings many of whom can choose if they work and for how long.
    Such a policy would simply repeat the experiences we had in the UK during the period 2012-2014 with the profound political alienation of much of the low-mid skilled working class around the country.
    Not if the government stopped inflating house prices artificially. The real problem for workers around and below the median wage over the last decade has been that asset inflation far outstrips what they can save from earnings. Asset inflation largely driven by QE and the low interest rate environment, which are government choices to protect the investments of their core voters.

    Yes immigration is another contributory factor in house price inflation, but we will get immigration regardless of government policy or intent as we need it, hence the numbers continuing post Brexit. But we could still work to restore the balance between workers and capital so those on and around the median wage can reasonably afford to buy their own homes in their twenties or early thirties.
    Asset prices for houses has very little to do with interest rates and is very much to do with supply and demand instead.

    House price earnings ratio rocketed in the 2000s not the 2010s, when base rate was around 6% - it has remained relatively stable since then, despite the fact that interest rates have been around 0% most of that time.

    Unsurprisingly if you add 300k population but don't add ~300k bedrooms per annum then you end up with house prices going up. Who could have guessed that?
    We have been through the idea that asset prices have little to do with interest rates at least a couple of times before so have no interest in doing so again. Such a view is just economically illiterate.
    "Asset prices" as a generic class of course are related to interest rates.

    Specific assets have to do with supply and demand.

    Housing specifically, is due to the supply and demand of housing. The price earnings ratio reached 7x when base rate was 6% so why do you think base rate rising to 2% would drop the ratio below that now?

    If you want the price earnings ratio to go down, then you need to construct more houses. TINA applies.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    I said this 2 days ago...

    ‘Given Boris Johnson’s reported desire to give Carrie “something to keep her busy”, might serving as Lord Geidt’s replacement be the perfect role for the former head of CCHQ communications? She’d certainly have enough work on her hands.’

    ✍️ Steerpike

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/carry-on-carrie-day-iv
  • noneoftheabovenoneoftheabove Posts: 20,454
    Leon said:

    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom

    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    No, it talks explicitly about "white people" all the way through

    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"

    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"

    It's your *passion* on this that is so striking. It's as if you think that the notion of there being an ingrained sense of white superiority in many parts of the world is utterly ludicrous. Whereas to me it would be quite surprising - given the importance over such a long time of colonialism in shaping people and events - if there wasn't.
    I don't believe white people are intrinsically and irreversibly racist, and anyone that teaches that to my white daughters will get a REDACTED

    I am off to Armenia's third most interesting monastery in a moment, but before I go, one final thought

    Even if the Culture Wars bore you (they shouldn't), even if you think Wokeness is harmless or imaginary (it isn't) this should absolutely compel everyone on this forum, because it really is shaping American politics. Important elections have already been won and lost over this (Virginia, California) and the issue is only growing in salience

    It is not implausible to say that this madness could push Trump over the line, and into power in 2024. And that should concern the whole world

    Later
    I backed Trump for 2024 at crazy odds straight after the last election, I could not believe the prices being offered. And you are right that it is politically important that America has gone crazy and enough people prefer an authoritarian nationalist simpleton as President that they are willing to sacrifice democracy, reason and self respect to enable him. All that can be said without any need for countering hyperbolic nonsense from the fringe left with hyperbolic nonsense of your own though.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
    So crucial, the only person who ever seems to mention any of those names is . . . you.

    If it weren't for you, I'd never have heard of Robin de Angelo etc, so not especially crucial.

    Seems to be a modern day equivalent of Noam Chomsky trying to end capitalism, which didn't exactly get far. Why not just ignore her and let her be niche rather than constantly magnifying what she has to say?
    What the F are you on about?


    Robin de Angelo's White Fragility was a massive NYT bestseller and has 150,000 ratings on Goodreads: that's HUGE

    See here:

    ‘White Fragility’ Is Everywhere. But Does Antiracism Training Work?
    Robin DiAngelo’s best seller is giving white Americans a new way to talk about race. "

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/15/magazine/white-fragility-robin-diangelo.html?
  • Dura_AceDura_Ace Posts: 12,880
    Sandpit said:

    Co-pilots even get charged (£25k?) for their 737 type rating (which the company sees as a profit centre)

    I reckon that's fair enough given there is effectively an infinite number of dreamers who want to get into civil aviation and Ryanair don't bond their cadets like other operators.

    I have an old shipmate who is 737 captain based in MLA and he reckons they are good to work for. (He is a former Sea King driver so he's possibly not "all there".) The two other captains I know (BA and EK) have NOTHING good to say about their employers.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019

    Leon said:

    Pulpstar said:

    Why do racists object to people criticising racism or white supremacy?

    It is truly a mystery for our age. 🤔

    To be fair some the language that is used in those documents does not make much sense to me and other parts are clearly hyperbolic. I don't think they are generally helpful or balanced. But nor are they an attack on white people themselves.
    I think that line sadly has been crossed at times. The "White silence is violence" chant springs to mind. The hyperbolic shouty left in the USA tends to be quite white mind, black people tend to have more sense - Bernie Sanders always hits a brick wall when the Democrat primaries head to places like Virginia & the carolinas.
    Yes, one tremendous irony in all this is the most extreme Wokeness - especially in academe, education, etc- is nearly always driven by white middle class liberals. Apart from a few activists, in BLM etc, it is white Democrats pushing this White Supremacy stuff. And many if not most of the authors of the crucial CRT texts are white. Robin de Angelo, Richard Delgado, David Goldberg, Gary Peller...
    So crucial, the only person who ever seems to mention any of those names is . . . you.

    If it weren't for you, I'd never have heard of Robin de Angelo etc, so not especially crucial.

    Seems to be a modern day equivalent of Noam Chomsky trying to end capitalism, which didn't exactly get far. Why not just ignore her and let her be niche rather than constantly magnifying what she has to say?
    She's a bestseller.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842
    One (Obvious to us but unremarked generally) thing about the strikes is this is very much a war Boris wants to have.
  • LeonLeon Posts: 46,248

    Leon said:

    kinabalu said:

    Leon said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    mwadams said:

    Leon said:

    I think it behoves us all to read this document on getting racism out of maths, a document which is now part of the Californian education system. Here's an excerpt about "white supremacy" in the mathematics classroom

    NOTES ON TERMS
    The terms used in the engagement section of this resource are ideas presented in the dismantling Racism workbook
    (2016) notebook, grounded on the work of Jones and Okun (2001). It is important to read this article first to fully
    understand the terms that are identified as characteristics of white supremacy culture in organizations. We contextualize these ideas into the math classroom to make visible how white supremacy culture plays out in these spaces.

    As a visual indicator, we italicize the terms used to identify white supremacy characteristics as
    defined by Jones and Okun (2001). They are as follows:

    • Perfectionism
    • Sense of Urgency
    • Defensiveness
    • Quantity Over Quality
    • Worship of the Written Word
    • Paternalism
    • Either/Or Thinking
    • Power Hoarding
    • Fear of Open Conflict
    • Individualism
    • Only One Right Way
    • Progress is Bigger, More
    • Objectivity
    • Right to Comfort

    Damn those white kids doing maths with their "objectivity", "sense of urgency", perfectionism", and "fear of open conflict", what maths needs is "subjectivity", "a sense of Whatever", "who cares if its right", and "open conflict"

    https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11/1_STRIDE1.pdf

    Hmmm. The rest of the document is an excellent approach to inclusivity and engagement in maths teaching, and I'd warmly commend it to the group. So I thought I'd also take ten minutes to see what this list is about.

    https://www.uuare.org/cwsc/

    Good link there. And the discussion of objectivity in terms of worldview, which would include things such as previous experiences of being taught maths, variation of approaches to problems (e.g. analytical, visual), is absolutely applicable to maths teaching. You can easily see how a dominant culture applying a single 'objective' approach to teaching might exclude those who do not share that.

    So I think we can untwist our knickers here. Remember, this is about *teaching* maths. And it isn't about white kids per se, it's about white supremacist teachers constructing an environment which demonstrates their theories that white kids in their classes are "better" at maths than black kids.
    Just checked that link


    Here we go. Here is the list of things included under Perfectionism, which in just one of the.....


    "CHARACTERISTICS OF WHITE SUPREMACY CULTURE
    by Tema Okun (original article)

    This is a list of characteristics of white supremacy culture which show up in our organizations:

    PERFECTIONISM

    little appreciation expressed among people for the work that others are doing; appreciation that is expressed usually directed to those who get most of the credit anyway

    more common is to point out either how the person or work is inadequate

    or even more common, to talk to others about the inadequacies of a person or their work without ever talking directly to them

    mistakes are seen as personal, i.e. they reflect badly on the person making them as opposed to being seen for what they are: mistakes

    making a mistake is confused with being a mistake, doing wrong with being wrong

    little time, energy, or money put into reflection or identifying lessons learned that can improve practice, in other words little or no learning from mistakes

    tendency to identify what’s wrong; little ability to identify, name, and appreciate what’s right"


    In short: white people and white teachers and white kids are intrinsically nasty, mean, selfish, self-centred, spiteful, critical, guilt-ridden and so on, and so forth

    This is pure, bilious racism. This has fuck all to do with "whiteness". Imagine ascribing these characterstics to "blackness" or "Jewishness" or "Chineseness"
    No - it doesn't say that.

    It says that *people who are trying to control people from a white supremacist perspective do these kinds of things". Which is *absolutely true*.

    Not that "doing any or all of these things makes you a white supremacist". Or that any individual thing is a massive problem in and of itself.

    However, if you apply the antidotes, you get great outcomes *without the negative risks*.

    ETA: For example, these are exactly the kind of things that other cults do too - e.g. the problematic Madrasas which radicalise Islamic youth.
    More from your link:


    "White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, Christian hegemony - these and more are all interconnected and intersected and stirred together in a toxic brew that is reflected in our devastation of the air and water and land and living beings we have and are destroying and disregarding in the name of profit and power. This brew is a cancer, a dis-ease, an addiction, an infliction and it infects everything with and without our awareness. The miracle is that we have survived as well as we have, the miracle is our ancestors who have fought to remember who we really are, the miracle is the earth and wind and water that restores itself in soft and fierce determination to keep us all whole. "

    Basically white people are killing the earth, and white people are evil. I can't see any other way of interpreting this. And you want this in our classroom as they are now smuggling it into American classrooms?
    The article talks about white supremacism. You interpret that to mean being white. This is a familiar far right trope.

    No, it talks explicitly about "white people" all the way through

    "for WHITE PEOPLE a culturally supported focus on determining whether an individual is racist or not while ignoring cultural, institutional, and systemic racism; the strongly felt need by many if not most white people to claim they are "not racist" while their conditioning into racism is relentless and unavoidable"

    "acknowledge that all WHITE PEOPLE have internalized racist conditioning and that an anti-racist commitment is not about being "good" or "bad," it's about figuring out what we are going to do about our conditioning"

    "Robin DiAngelo talks about the ways in which WHITE PEOPLE defend against or deflect the idea that we are conditioned into racism"

    "a young, white, liberal, do-gooding woman, whose only frame of reference was the "nobility" of working across lines of race and Kamau, whose lived experience let him know the dangers of working with WHITE PEOPLE"

    It's your *passion* on this that is so striking. It's as if you think that the notion of there being an ingrained sense of white superiority in many parts of the world is utterly ludicrous. Whereas to me it would be quite surprising - given the importance over such a long time of colonialism in shaping people and events - if there wasn't.
    I don't believe white people are intrinsically and irreversibly racist, and anyone that teaches that to my white daughters will get a REDACTED

    I am off to Armenia's third most interesting monastery in a moment, but before I go, one final thought

    Even if the Culture Wars bore you (they shouldn't), even if you think Wokeness is harmless or imaginary (it isn't) this should absolutely compel everyone on this forum, because it really is shaping American politics. Important elections have already been won and lost over this (Virginia, California) and the issue is only growing in salience

    It is not implausible to say that this madness could push Trump over the line, and into power in 2024. And that should concern the whole world

    Later
    I backed Trump for 2024 at crazy odds straight after the last election, I could not believe the prices being offered. And you are right that it is politically important that America has gone crazy and enough people prefer an authoritarian nationalist simpleton as President that they are willing to sacrifice democracy, reason and self respect to enable him. All that can be said without any need for countering hyperbolic nonsense from the fringe left with hyperbolic nonsense of your own though.
    Please point out where I have been hyperbolic. I'll help you: I haven't

    All I have done is cite actual quotes from texts being used, in different ways, to shape Californian education

    My personal opinions have generally been restricted to noting the likely political impact of this. With which you agree
This discussion has been closed.