Off Topic The Politics Thread

shes upset her cleaners now
imagine being mistaken for something usefull

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City A.M.
@CityAM

‘I was mistaken for a cleaner’, says Gina Miller http://dlvr.it/RbLFgd

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Easy mistake. Then again some of our players have been mistaken for footballers...

 

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BARGAIN

 

How much does it cost to give old people free tv

 

Seems the BBC will save about £500m next year by abolition for all but those pensioners over 75 who receive pension credits

 

never knew scrabble had a banned list
Scrabble bans 236 bigoted words, slurs from official list
By Natalie O'Neill

July 9, 2020 | 3:13pm


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Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
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Scrabble just got W-O-K-E.

Players of the classic board game will no longer be able to rack up points for spelling out racial and ethnic slurs, according to Scrabble officials.

A total of 236 bigoted words were removed from the official Scrabble word list used at tournaments — in order to make the game friendlier to all types of people, The North American Scrabble Players Association. said Wednesday.

“Removing slurs is the very least that we can do to make our association more inclusive,” NASPA CEO John Chew said in a statement. “How can we in this day tell prospective members that they can only play with us if they accept that offensive slurs have no meaning when played on a board?”

But not all members of the 10,000-strong group, which was polled about whether to scrap the hateful words agreed — and some were angry about the change.

“Some members threatened to leave the association if a single word were removed; others threatened to leave the association if any offensive words remained. There were a lot of good and bad arguments on both sides,” Chew said in the statement.

The group didn’t say which specific words had been removed but Chew told NPR the “N word” — worth a measly eight points — was among the first to get the boot.

The toy company Hasbro, which owns the rights to Scrabble, backed up the decision by changing the rules of the game “to make clear that slurs are not permissible.”

 

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Laurence Fox

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@LozzaFox
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Jul 13

Make tax havens great again.

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Strong armed by the US, the UK is banning the use of Huawei in it's 5G roll-out...

Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027
By Leo Kelion
Technology desk editor

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The UK's mobile providers are being banned from buying new Huawei 5G equipment after 31 December, and they must also remove all the Chinese firm's 5G kit from their networks by 2027.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-53403793

This will cost the networks a **** load of money - most of the 5G equipment already deployed is Huawei, although both EE and Three (who I'm currently doing work for) are migrating away and will be deploying Ericsson hardware.

 

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Congratulations to Chris Grayling who managed to lose a rigged vote to be President Cummings’ puppet on the Intelligence & Security Committee. ****ing useless **** should be working in Subway.

Actually I like Subway. He should be working at Burger King.

 

Julian 'Leave Means Leave' Lewis got it instead. His first job will be to decide not to publish the Russia report.

 

They’ve removed the whip now. Classy touch.

 

The woke left now openly says that bosses have a right to sack employees over their opinions. They have become so intolerant of free speech and the views of ordinary people they now believe in bosses’ rights over workers’ rights, writes
@Tom_Slater_


Cancel culture is not about the powerful
The left is defending the right of employers to punish people for their opinions.

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Tom Slater
Deputy Editor


13th July 2020

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Topics Free Speech Politics UK USA
Being left-wing used to mean agitating against people losing their jobs. How quaint that feels now. In the culture wars of today, the illiberal left’s primary response to any statement it disagrees with seems to be demanding that the person who said it be immediately sacked and made an example of.

For all these people’s blather about ‘Karens’ – that insufferable meme about entitled lower-middle-class white women who always want to speak to the manager – the ultimate Karens today are to be found on the identitarian left. They’ll go straight to the manager of anyone who dares utter a dissenting thought.

Now their censoriousness is being ‘called out’, as they might say. A letter published in Harper’s last week, signed by a diverse group of liberals, civil libertarians and left-wingers, raised the alarm about the growing intolerance on the left and the mobbing of the insufficiently woke.

The response from the pro-censorship left has been a carnival of obfuscation, bullshit and bad faith. A rogues’ gallery of illiberal midwits – many of them veterans of cancellation campaigns themselves – have denied cancel culture is even a thing and valiantly argued with caricatures of their opponents’ arguments.

Corbynista Guardian columnist Owen Jones says cancel culture is just ‘public figures being criticised on Twitter for things they’ve said’. Here he is apparently struggling with the distinction between ‘being criticised’ and ‘being faced by demands they be sacked’, which is of course what we’re actually talking about.

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That he doesn’t seem to know the difference is a little odd, given he spends a good chunk of time doing the latter nowadays. Just a few weeks ago he was calling on Oxford University to fire its deputy director of external affairs and international strategy over something unpleasant he tweeted about Ash Sarkar.

This braindead take, that the backlash to cancel culture is just rich people complaining about being criticised, has been repeated ad nauseam. Nesrine Malik, of the Guardian (again), accused those behind the Harper’s letter of being influential people ‘unaccustomed to being questioned’.

Given the letter was signed by Salman Rushdie, that take doesn’t even hold water if you glance at the list of signatories – unless you think the fatwa was a devastating Twitter thread. But nor does it hold water if you bother to read the text itself.

The letter describes ‘an intolerance of opposing views’ and a ‘vogue for public shaming and ostracism’ that is leading people to ‘fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus’, or even just make ‘clumsy mistakes’. In the UK, this culture has resulted in far more than ‘criticism’ of dubious public figures.

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Why borders matter
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Indeed, even upstanding people in public life, like Nobel Prize-winning scientist Sir Tim Hunt and veteran newsreader Alastair Stewart, have been sacked after their innocent words were yanked out of context and their employers gave in to mob pressure.

But, more importantly, the letter argues that this culture is more of a threat to those without power, influence and gilded academic positions. ‘The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society’, it says, ‘invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation’.

This is a crucial point. The mobbing of prominent figures doesn’t only have a chilling effect on debate more broadly, by setting the terms of acceptable debate for everyone else; it also legitimises the cancellation of less powerful people – those less able to fight back.

Critics of the Harper’s letter constantly single out one of its signatories – JK Rowling, who has faced abuse and death and rape threats for expressing trans-sceptical views. The idea that this multimillionaire author, with more than 14million Twitter followers, has been ‘silenced’ is ridiculous, they scoff.

But no one, including Rowling, is saying that she has been silenced or cancelled. Rather, it is the people further down the pecking order, those without hundreds of millions of pounds in the bank, who will ultimately bear the brunt of this silencing dynamic.

In fact, in relation to the Rowling controversy, that’s already happened. Children’s author Gillian Philip was sacked earlier this month for the crime of expressing support for JK Rowling. After 24 hours of abuse and complaints, her publisher caved.

This case was put to activist and songwriter Billy Bragg over the weekend, after he rubbished cancel culture in the Guardian (and again). In response, this alleged socialist declared: ‘I believe that employers have a right to act in such circumstances.’

Here Bragg just came clean about what these illiberal leftists often try to obscure – that they have become so intolerant that they now stick up for the right of employers to sack people for their opinions. In this culture war, ‘bosses’ rights’ is their rallying cry.

While the woke left’s cancelling efforts are most often aimed at people in the more rarefied circles – the media, academia, the arts – that they move in, the climate they have whipped will inevitably hit ordinary working people, too.

Brian Leach, a disabled grandfather, lost his job in an Asda store in Yorkshire last year after he shared a Billy Connolly routine, which took the piss out of jihadists, on his personal Facebook page. Someone else on staff took offence, and he was sacked.

That the bourgeois left has become increasingly shrill and intolerant has been clear for some time. But it’s still worth asking why these supposed radicals are so comfortable handing over the power to police speech to the state, bosses and Silicon Valley.

Part of it has to do with their distance from working people. This is now so vast that they have begun to see corporations as the agents of change and pretty widely held beliefs – like thinking that rushing to put kids on puberty-blockers is probably not a good idea – as unspeakable heresies.

But it also speaks to how fundamentally unthreatening their ideas are. On cultural matters, certainly, they are the establishment – their kooky views on gender, privilege and much else besides are not only shared but even enforced by cancel culture, Silicon Valley and the state.

Meanwhile, their sixth-formerish poseur socialism isn’t a threat to anyone, not least because it lacks any popular support. Indeed, five years of Owen Jones-ism running the opposition led to Labour handing over its northern working-class heartlands to the Tories at the last election.

Now, deeply disappointed with ordinary people, the bourgeois left has resigned itself to policing their opinions, doing by compulsion and censure what it cannot do by reason and argument, with the assistance of the capitalist class where necessary.

No wonder they cling to cancel culture. It’s all they’ve got. In a way, it is all a bit tragic. But it is also a menace to the free speech of precisely the people the left once aspired to represent.

 

Interesting that journalist Suzanne Moore expressed a feminist view of the Trans community that didn't quite fit the current trend and resulted in 335 of her work 'colleagues' going behind her back to demand her sacking. So much for reasoned journalism so I was delighted to hear that 180 of those sh*ts will lose their jobs as tanking sales of the rag have left them on the brink...

 

Johnson dominated by Starmer again at PMQs today. When pressed by Starmer as to whether he'd actually read the government-commissioned report on the possibility of another wave of Covid in the winter - on which he'd just answered questions - all he could say was that he was 'aware' of the report, plainly terrified that he was being set up. He finished up with a pathetic planned 'joke' about briefs, out of his depth when confronted with someone who knows whereof he speaks.

Interesting that the Liberal bloke got him to confirm that there will be an enquiry into the government's Covid response, but only 'in time'. He'll be long gone by then and won't fight the next election.

 

Wow, just finding out more about this on Newsnight. An opposition coup - fascinating.

Looks like the report will be published then.