What's going on in your city/country/region?

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Utisz
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by Utisz » Sun Mar 28, 2021 6:27 am

ashi wrote:
Sat Mar 27, 2021 4:28 pm
... and no one is feeling particularly patient, understanding, or inclined to treat us like fellow humans so it has been just super great.
I think this is only gonna get worse. Fellow humans are a luxury we can no longer afford.

Like back in the day you knew your blacksmith, your tinker, your knocker-upper. And you were civil because you were their tanner, so the concept of fellow humanity was all just the Nash equilibrium of your given shithole.

Now the folk be depending on heady combinations of multinationals, automated call centres and pubescentes in Bangladesh to debug their bluetooth key finders. They rate how well their delivery drivers are trying to scrape together a living on a scale of one to five and hit a button outside the toilets of some intermediary airport in some developing country to indicate their level of satisfaction with the trans-continental shit they just had.

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jyng1
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by jyng1 » Sun Mar 28, 2021 9:06 pm

Limey wrote:
Tue Mar 23, 2021 6:57 pm
I'll let a local explain some of the council stupidity in this video: https://fb.watch/4pYEKLQGj-/

This was the way down to the shore, which the council only seem to now want to allow buses and cycles to access.
They didn't even announce those first changes and had no signs up with cars suddenly driving towards each other!

They've just redone it a second time and it still looks pretty stupid and unnecessary on what was a quiet road that didn't need fixing.
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djm
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by djm » Sun Mar 28, 2021 11:53 pm

I don't know where to start this week. I will cover the disgraceful riots in Bristol elsewhere, and focus on Batley.

This week a teacher in Yorkshire dared show a depiction of Mohammed in the context of a lesson about blasphemy. The result has been picketing and intimidation from hardline Islamists, and a disgraceful and cowardly lack of support from the school, political parties and teaching unions. Link to a well-written article here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/0 ... rinciples/

This is a secular nation, and I do not wish to see de facto blasphemy laws creep in via the back door. The teacher was perhaps naive but is now in hiding Salmon Rushdie style.

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jyng1
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by jyng1 » Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:25 am

djm wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 11:53 pm
I don't know where to start this week. I will cover the disgraceful riots in Bristol elsewhere, and focus on Batley.

This week a teacher in Yorkshire dared show a depiction of Mohammed in the context of a lesson about blasphemy. The result has been picketing and intimidation from hardline Islamists, and a disgraceful and cowardly lack of support from the school, political parties and teaching unions. Link to a well-written article here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/0 ... rinciples/

This is a secular nation, and I do not wish to see de facto blasphemy laws creep in via the back door. The teacher was perhaps naive but is now in hiding Salmon Rushdie style.
The Torygraph is paywalled... I found one from Aljazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2 ... -suspended

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:34 am

jyng1 wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:25 am
djm wrote:
Sun Mar 28, 2021 11:53 pm
I don't know where to start this week. I will cover the disgraceful riots in Bristol elsewhere, and focus on Batley.

This week a teacher in Yorkshire dared show a depiction of Mohammed in the context of a lesson about blasphemy. The result has been picketing and intimidation from hardline Islamists, and a disgraceful and cowardly lack of support from the school, political parties and teaching unions. Link to a well-written article here:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/0 ... rinciples/

This is a secular nation, and I do not wish to see de facto blasphemy laws creep in via the back door. The teacher was perhaps naive but is now in hiding Salmon Rushdie style.
The Torygraph is paywalled... I found one from Aljazeera https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/2 ... -suspended
I wonder what the Marxist-Leninist perspective on this is.

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jyng1
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by jyng1 » Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:42 am

Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:34 am
I wonder what the Marxist-Leninist perspective on this is.
"Religion is the opium of the people".

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:43 am

jyng1 wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:42 am
Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:34 am
I wonder what the Marxist-Leninist perspective on this is.
"Religion is the opium of the people".
That's what I would have thought. I'm sympathetic to migrants and refugees, especially those from regions that the U.S. and Britain fucked over because of imperialistic foreign policy; and I think a lot of the xenophobia about them is extremely hypocritical after all the effort we spent trying to bring them "freedom" (lol) because we cared about them so much. (If you don't like people coming to your house and trying to tell you how to do things, maybe you shouldn't have demolished their house because it didn't seem up to date enough to be a comfortable place to live, which also allowed you to build things on top of the space that you made a lot of money out of [which of course isn't related at all].) At the same time, I have a hard time seeing why one religion should be protected and not other ones. And I don't think death threats (or actual murders) are excusable depending on which particular religion. Perhaps the cartoons wereoffensive but in my view that doesn't create some kind of equivalency with death threats.

Part of this whole problem is that the U.S. government's idiotic response to 9/11 has actually done nothing except make the problem of Islamic extremism worse, and naturally, nobody involved with that in the U.S. has faced or will face accountability for that.

There, that's my crazy hateful bigoted opinion on the matter.

Oh, and I'm sorry I keep editing to add clarity, but there's something else I just remembered. Doesn't Britain have much more restrictive laws about free speech than the U.S. and they don't actually have an equivalent to a first amendment? (They also happen to have an official church which the head of state is basically de jure the Pope of, so it's not entirely secular.) Perhaps within the context of the British legal system, the reaction isn't as extreme as it might seem in an American context? I tend not to hear about Muslims in the U.S. doing things like this.
Last edited by Julius_Van_Der_Beak on Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:10 am, edited 1 time in total.

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jyng1
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by jyng1 » Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:10 am

Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:43 am
I'm sympathetic to migrants and refugees, especially those from regions that the U.S. and Britain fucked over because of imperialistic foreign policy;
The British Empire had more Muslims than Christians and the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave any member of the Commonwealth right of abode in the United Kingdom and Islands.

Julius_Van_Der_Beak

Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by Julius_Van_Der_Beak » Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:12 am

jyng1 wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:10 am
Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:43 am
I'm sympathetic to migrants and refugees, especially those from regions that the U.S. and Britain fucked over because of imperialistic foreign policy;
The British Empire had more Muslims than Christians and the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave any member of the Commonwealth right of abode in the United Kingdom and Islands.
Yeah, that's what gets me. I hear about what an injustice it is that these people are coming over and changing their culture (and I've been hearing that for decades at this point), but didn't the British try to do that to the entire rest of the world? (And us Yanks are not really that much better, I should add). I'd find it less self-serving and overwrought if there was at least an acknowledgment of that fact instead of acting as though that never happened.

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jyng1
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Re: What's going on in your city/country/region?

Post by jyng1 » Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:19 am

Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:12 am
jyng1 wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 4:10 am
Julius_Van_Der_Beak wrote:
Mon Mar 29, 2021 3:43 am
I'm sympathetic to migrants and refugees, especially those from regions that the U.S. and Britain fucked over because of imperialistic foreign policy;
The British Empire had more Muslims than Christians and the British Nationality Act of 1948 gave any member of the Commonwealth right of abode in the United Kingdom and Islands.
Yeah, that's what gets me. I hear about what an injustice it is that these people are coming over and changing their culture (and I've been hearing that for decades at this point), but didn't the British try to do that to the entire rest of the world? (And us Yanks are not really that much better, I should add). I'd find it less self-serving and overwrought if there was at least an acknowledgment of that fact instead of acting as though that never happened.
I imagine in 1948 the UK was actively recruiting them for shipping, nursing, rail etc... but yes, I imagine the irony is lost on a lot of people.

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