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UK Politics: Johnsons Hoaxy Yurt North of Hadrian's Wall


Tywin Manderly

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On 9/11/2020 at 8:30 PM, Chaircat Meow said:

How do you feel about reneging on international treaties and government ministers saying 'we are planning to break the law?'

I mean, I sort of do it see it both ways on the Irish protocol really . But once you've signed you've got to carry through.

At the moment I don't know how to feel about it. On the face of things it looks a poorly conceived move that has little defence. My general thought around events like this is to really to just see how it plays out, because I learnt over the last couple of years that incidents like this are rarely what they seem and we have to remember we are in the middle of negotiations so there are things said which don't always play out in the way we think they do.

It's said this is really just a tactic to get talks restarted, give the EU a kick up the ass and inject some reality as to the situation. There is probably an element of truth in this. The EU are fixated on State Aid and level playing fields, when the UK has been quite clear it is simply looking for a FTA agreement much like the EU has with other countries.

From a Brexiteer perspective, that I have read elsewhere, essentially the argument here is that this bill is a defence against the EU's own breaking of the WA. The argument is that by not seriously engaging in the idea of negotiating a free trade agreement as described in the WA, the EU is breaking its promises. Secondly by taking an extreme interpretation of the wording of the WA the EU is attempting to break up the sovereignty of the UK, especially if Barnier's alleged threat to cut off food supplies is true. 

I don't know if I agree with that perspective, the WA is what it is, and Johnson signed it. To turn around and say they might need to change because it was signed in a rush is ridiculous. 

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Serious woke alert. David Hume has been cancelled. 

https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/students/2020/equality-diversity-and-inclusion-an-update

Very silly as per usual. One of my favourite philosophers and one of Scotland's most famous thinkers and you can't even name a tower after him at a university. 

 

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6 minutes ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Serious woke alert. David Hume has been cancelled. 

https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/students/2020/equality-diversity-and-inclusion-an-update

Very silly as per usual. One of my favourite philosophers and one of Scotland's most famous thinkers and you can't even name a tower after him at a university. 

 

It seems rather inconsequential to be honest. Would Hume’s works be any less studied if a tower isn’t named after him? Have all things relating to Hum been subsequently banned from the public apparatus? 
 

Not really. 
 

I think a lot outcry over these sorts of things is a desire to some idolatry of specific figures.

Which eh. 

Such desires could lead to people failing to see nuance or great flaws in certain figures.

 

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Thoroughly depressing piece in the Guardian.

If Manchester's farcical lockdown is any clue, the second wave will hit us all hard

Quote

 

If the government had tried to design a lockdown that was bound to fail, it could scarcely have done a better job. The rules are now so convoluted that they are nigh-on impossible to understand: they seem to change almost daily, with no serious effort to communicate these changes. Worst of all, they simply don’t make sense to people. Children can go to school but can’t visit their friends? I can go to the pub but not see my mum in my garden?

The tone was set when Matt Hancock first announced the restrictions on Twitter at 9pm the night before Eid. I found out from my sister-in-law, who I’d arranged to meet the next day. At 10.45pm, we got a text saying she was no longer allowed to come to our house. I thought she must have got it wrong: the rules had never changed with such short notice before. Half an hour later, another text. “Well, since we last spoke it has also become illegal to meet in your garden,” my sister said. “So I guess it’s the park.” For us, changing plans was fairly painless. For those who’d already travelled and prepared food for Eid, it would have been heartbreaking.

Then there’s the doublethink of having new restrictions imposed at the same time the government is aggressively exhorting us to get back to normal. We could no longer meet friends at home, yet Rishi Sunak actively subsidised us to go out for a burger. Things were dangerous enough to put our family lives on hold, but safe enough that we should all be going back to the office. The government insisted there was no contradiction here, since the problem was people not distancing in their own homes. Yet now Bolton pubs have been shut down after being linked to a cluster of outbreaks.

Inevitably, all this has led to widespread non-compliance. “People are just doing what they want, they’re fed up with the changes all the time,” one person told me. “I don’t know anyone who’s given it the slightest bit of notice,” said another. The government is asking people to sacrifice things that they really care about while actively encouraging them to do things they don’t really care about. It is doing so in a cavalier and disrespectful way that doesn’t even try to empathise with how difficult these sacrifices might be. Meanwhile, its defence of Dominic Cummings is etched in people’s memories: breaking the rules for the sake of your family is not only fine, it’s what any good person would do. It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to work out that this is not a winning combination.

 

Four more years of this shit. But, yay, at least we'll get Brexit done. 

 

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15 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

Britain will be fucking done too.

A tax haven for Rees-mogand chums while the peasants are stripped of rights. At least Scotland and Northern Ireland have potential outs.

Eh. The economic costs of this venture was always known.

Persevering some vague notion of culture from a practically nonexistent threat has/had always been worth such things to most Brexxiters.

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6 hours ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Serious woke alert. David Hume has been cancelled. 

https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/students/2020/equality-diversity-and-inclusion-an-update

Very silly as per usual. One of my favourite philosophers and one of Scotland's most famous thinkers and you can't even name a tower after him at a university.

I did two years of classes in DHT as an undergrad, reading Hume's works, and they were a huge influence on me. So I do feel I have some personal stake here. But calling this 'very silly' is trivialising racism, Hume is famous, unarguably, but he was also unarguably racist. I don't want to quote his views at length here: instead I'll link to this newspaper article that does so.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18717804.david-hume-racist-scottish-philosophers-racist-comment-full/

While the language he uses can to some extent be explained by the times, the views he espouses are undoubtedly racist and it's offensive to ask black and other non-white students to attend classes in philosophy in a place named after a man who thought them incapable by reason of their race of being 'eminent either in action or speculation' and who likened an educated black person to 'a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly'. 

1 hour ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Eh. The economic costs of this venture was always known.

Persevering some vague notion of culture from a practically nonexistent threat has/had always been worth such things to most Brexxiters.

Well... yes and no.

In the abstract, Brexit supporters were willing to say these things were worth it, in opinion polls and so on. But opinion polling on questions like that is unreliable, in that once the price becomes a concrete thing, people can and do change their minds on whether it was worth it. Buyers' regret, and all that.

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On 9/13/2020 at 9:33 PM, Ser Reptitious said:

David Hume Tower? It’s called that in the very link you posted, so why the confusion?

Yes, well. One of those things.

I have been to the University of Edinburgh on a few occasions but don't know the campus well and until I googled it just now I didn't know what the tower actually looked like. What an awful building though, almost don't mind them naming it something else now I have seen it. 

On 9/13/2020 at 7:13 PM, mormont said:

I did two years of classes in DHT as an undergrad, reading Hume's works, and they were a huge influence on me. So I do feel I have some personal stake here. But calling this 'very silly' is trivialising racism, Hume is famous, unarguably, but he was also unarguably racist. I don't want to quote his views at length here: instead I'll link to this newspaper article that does so.

https://www.thenational.scot/news/18717804.david-hume-racist-scottish-philosophers-racist-comment-full/

While the language he uses can to some extent be explained by the times, the views he espouses are undoubtedly racist and it's offensive to ask black and other non-white students to attend classes in philosophy in a place named after a man who thought them incapable by reason of their race of being 'eminent either in action or speculation' and who likened an educated black person to 'a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly'. 

You are not the one who gets to say what is offensive and what isn't to black and other non-white students. If they're philosophy students they may be pleased to study their subject in David Hume Tower. They have just as much right as you or I to admire the wonderful exploration of causation and knowledge in the Treatise. In all likelihood they will have to read Hume at some point on most general philosophy courses (or at least bits of him), so living or working in a tower named after him seems the least of their troubles.

Ultimately though this will be like the last night of the proms episode. Some white woke warriors will have decided black and other non-white students ought to be offended by this, which does non-white philosophy students a disservice. 

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5 minutes ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Ultimately though this will be like the last night of the proms episode. Some white woke warriors will have decided black and other non-white students ought to be offended by this, which does non-white philosophy students a disservice. 

As opposed to you, uh, white person (unwoke warrior?) deciding on your own that they oughtn’t be offended by this? 

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7 minutes ago, Soylent Brown said:

You mean the Proms thing which was largely a far-right fabrication?

Yeah that’s what I heard, except that then the BBC did in fact confirm they were planning to perform the songs without singing the lyrics. So it wasn’t actually a total fabrication at all. 

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6 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Yeah that’s what I heard, except that then the BBC did in fact confirm they were planning to perform the songs without singing the lyrics. So it wasn’t actually a total fabrication at all. 

Right, they decided to perform the songs without lyrics as there wouldn't really be people there. The audience usually sing along so it would be pretty hollow without that. Not an unreasonable decision.

But then a far-right dipshit picks up on this and starts complaining that the BBC is cancelling the Queen or whatever and the Farage gang end up goose-stepping around screeching for the BBC to be defunded, etc.

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@Heartofice

What exactly did I say that I confused you?

Do you think Brexit wasn't done with the economic and geopolitical ramifications known to the public?

And that most Brexiters said that was, giving a very vague invocation of having to protect their culture which was going to change by...maybe they'd like less tea, or crumpets, or other nice sounding things lol. 

1 hour ago, Chaircat Meow said:

Ultimately though this will be like the last night of the proms episode. Some white woke warriors will have decided black and other non-white students ought to be offended by this, which does non-white philosophy students a disservice. 

If none-white students had pushed this would you actually think it's more acceptable?

Hell where are you getting that's not what happened? That there was no support for such a venture by the nonwhite students?

If not why do you keep referencing the students’ whiteness as if that somehow illegitimatizes it?

1 hour ago, Soylent Brown said:

Right, they decided to perform the songs without lyrics as there wouldn't really be people there. The audience usually sing along so it would be pretty hollow without that. Not an unreasonable decision.

But then a far-right dipshit picks up on this and starts complaining that the BBC is cancelling the Queen or whatever and the Farage gang end up goose-stepping around screeching for the BBC to be defunded, etc.

Ah, it is so far-right to get easily offended and try cancel BBC for not apparently being as patriotic/nationalistic as them. 

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