It should be as plain as the distinguished schnozz on your handsome face, old chap.
My black wife got sick to death of being asked by her patients “Where do you come from, love?” and tended to shriek “London!” with an exaggerated rolling of her big brown eyes and a snarling smiling flash of her strong white teeth.
I know you are highly intelligent, widely travelled and scholarly Norman. Get a grip, man, get a grip …
With a cheeky thumb on my own alcohol gel-drenched schnozz, yours provokingly…
Peter
PS Berlina is British and has lived in Britain for 50 of her 77 years, and mother to our three adult British offspring…
You are completely wrong Norman as you feared. BAME means black Asian and ethnic minority and is a collective term for non-white people in the UK. Nothing to do with America or Asia.
Hope that clears it up for you.
Izzy x
I think it also possibly shows I haven’t got a handle or use for these categorisations either? Maybe I am not a racist as I don’t even think in these terms?
I sometimes regret the demise of the old term ‘racial prejudice’, which I think described a lot of attitudes held by basically good people on the basis of ignorance rather than malice (and I mean ignorance in its proper sense of ill-informed, rather than stupid).
This left the term ‘racism’ to apply to more systematic belief in white supremacy, and the really evil institutional stuff like apartheid, ‘Jim Crow’ laws, etc.
No Norman. Not knowing the widely used terms used to refer to people has nothing to do with whether you are racist or not. A racist is a person who shows or feels discrimination or prejudice against people of other races, or who believes that a particular race is superior to another. As long as you don’t do that you are not a racist.
Izzy x
The Daily Mail. The only thing they print which I would have any faith in its approximation to the truth is a sports result.
I would never read it, of itself. But occasionally it is, as in this case, quoted as one of several sources of a topic. If a story has any merit, it will be reported by sources less inclined to prejudice and outright mendacity.
I find the Daily Mail a revolting publication. Why would I voluntarily ingest something that would make me sick?
OK. I dipped into the story about the MP. This is a typical DM trick: in this case making out that the MP has made a ‘racist statement’ but really it’s a ploy to propagate his views.
The Mail does this all the time. Hiding behind apparent disapproval it bigs up the very prejudice it purports to reject. The DM editorial position is as close as we have in mainstream British news media of Orwell’s ‘The Ministry of Truth’
Agreed. I never even click through to Daily Mail or Telegraph stories - because even this apparently innocent act gets recorded in their systems and helps them claim readership - and therefore helps ‘fund hate’, as the saying goes.
Regrettable. However, my original comment ended at ‘sick’. I felt I must look at what had been reported before adding the rest.
Many years ago the Telegraph used to be a good newspaper, albeit accurately described by P/Eye as ‘The Torygraph’. Having said that, the most excoriating critiques of the slease-infected Tory Gov of the latter days of John Major were the editorials in The T/graph. Absolutely blistering.
Then all the best journos went off and set up The Indy, which I took from the 1st edition until the picture desk pulled a rank porkie.
A long queue of Russians was shown, in a snowy Moscow square, “Queueing for a bread shop to open”.
A letter was published by a person who “…walks past this queue every morning. You have cropped out the church which they are waiting to open”
As someone who spent 9 months in Peshawar training Afghans to write truthful, factual captions to photographs, I was particularly incensed and disappointed.
Grovelling apologies by Indy editor. End of my readership.
If you never read what 'the other half ’ thinks and feels - aren’t you only getting one side of the story ? Or do you - in your great wisdom- think you know what they think or that actually you don’t know of care what they think?
Odd comment Sue. Do you think people should spend their valuable time reading things they neither like nor believe are anything more than lies and deception? - and moreover, do you think people should help financially support what they see as the dissemination of lies and deception?
No - I just wonder how you can argue with someone or try to convince them of something if you don’t know their point of view or what or how they think. Aren’t you just arguing in the dark?
There were a couple of TV programmes where Ed Balls went to talk to “Trump’s America”. I found them interesting as he seemed to really want to understand their point of view. And, as a result, I got a much better idea of why people voted the way they did and could see the logic from their point of view. I still think he is a repellant, lying, narcissist who is no more fit to run a county than my 6 year old granddaughter - but I finally get what appealed to these voters. Hopefully the opposition also take notice to refine their policies.
I’m not sure if you’re talking about me personally Sue, or using the second person to mean ‘Isn’t one - ie. everybody - just arguing in the dark?’
If you mean me personally - it might be useful if I mention that I can at this moment look across at my bookshelves and see the Autobiographies of both Mussolini and Malcolm X; the collected poems of Ezra Pound - an avowed fascist - almost next to those of Berthold Brecht - a communist; or for that matter Smith’s Wealth of Nations almost next to Marx’s Capital.
If you mean in general how do human beings understand others’ views - of course through empathetic listening, reading, watching, discourse - but it helps to focus on the best evidenced and argued of all the diverse views, not the simplistic parroting of the same old misinformation and prejudices by the half-cut pub boor you’ve heard sounding off a dozen times before (and to not keep buying him drinks!).
It’s all very well being thoroughly well read, brimming with erudition, having a grasp of the workings of the main players in history, such as GC mentioned.
But, day to day, as the processes evolve and the actions play out which form everyones views now, it is impossible to put up a countervaling argument to any position if one has not made an effort to understand - or at least hear - those views which one opposes, unsavoury as they may be.
As for “the best evidenced and argued of all the diverse views”. How is his library of heavyweight tomes to deal with the “simplistic parroting of misinformation” on the side of Boris’s Bus and the effect, in real life, in real time, that it had?
How would he fare, primed with the arguments put forward by Marx, Malcolm X et al when confronted, in the aftermath of the referendum, by the woman who said she voted ‘OUT’ "because Swansea has had a hard time"? or the woman in a wheelchair [as I recall] who spat out "They’ll be telling us what toilet paper to use, next"
Where did these people get these ideas? If you don’t know, you can’t gainsay them. In this regard. JJ and SY are perfectly correct.
