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did i tell you all about how i almost wrote “arthur morgan” on my history exam instead of “arthur calwell” . because that is a thing that happened
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on twitter the things that people were typing and posting in public without a second thought and causing me psychic damage were at least constrained by the shorter format. it was always people admitting they did not shower, claiming showers were ableism, insisting they didn't smell when not showering, denouncing the use of soap, or the multimedia approach of taking video of catching their boyfriend showering without soap. DURING a pandemic
on tumblr it's paragraphs. it's eighteen paragraphs of "you know i never thought about how other people are distraught upon seeing the victims of genocide because i look at traffic fatalities because of my job lol" and "what if we had american-assimilation events where immigrants can come and insist they love america and aren't taking american jobs" how do you not regret this as your fingers. are hitting. the keys
#negative#submit button should be taken away if you start 'skill issue'-ing people about how you're soooo desensitized to dead bodies#quickly quickly who is not an immigrant who are you speaking about when you say taking your jobs and do you include English-speaking Briton#you know#because English is a FOREIGN LANGUAGE TO THE AMERICAN CONTINENT#ARE YOU REFERRING TO THE CREE AND OJIBWE AND LAKOTA AND SIOUX--
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Hadrian's Wall
Hadrian's Wall (known in antiquity as the Vallum Hadriani or the Vallum Aelian) is a defensive frontier work in northern Britain which dates from 122 CE. The wall ran from coast to coast at a length of 73 statute miles (120 km). Though the wall is commonly thought to have been built to mark the boundary line between Britain and Scotland, this is not so; no one knows the actual motivation behind its construction but it does not delineate a boundary between two countries.
While the wall did simply mark the northern boundary of the Roman Empire in Britain at the time, theories regarding the purpose of such a massive building project range from limiting immigration, to controlling smuggling, to keeping the indigenous people at bay north of the wall. The wall continued in use until it was abandoned in the early 5th century CE.
Purpose
The military effectiveness of the wall has been questioned by many scholars over the years owing to its length and the positioning of the fortifications along the route. The argument goes that, had the wall actually been built as a defensive barrier, it would have been constructed differently and at another location. Regarding this, Professors Scarre and Fagan write,
Archaeologists and historians have long debated whether Hadrian's Wall was an effective military barrier…Whatever its military effectiveness, however, it was clearly a powerful symbol of Roman military might. The biographer of Hadrian remarks that the emperor built the wall to separate the Romans from the barbarians. In the same way, the Chinese emperors built the Great Wall to separate China from the barbarous steppe peoples to the north. In both cases, in addition to any military function, the physical barriers served in the eyes of their builders to reinforce the conceptual divide between civilized and noncivilized. They were part of the ideology of empire. (Ancient Civilizations, 313)
This seems to be the best explanation for the underlying motive behind the construction of Hadrian's Wall. The Romans had been dealing with uprisings in Britain since their conquest of the region. Although Rome's first contact with Britain was through Julius Caesar's expeditions there in 55/54 BCE, Rome did not begin any systematic conquest until the year 43 CE under the Emperor Claudius (r. 41-54 CE).
The revolt of Boudicca of the Iceni in 60/61 CE resulted in the massacre of many Roman citizens and the destruction of major cities (among them, Londinium, modern London) and, according to the historian Tacitus (56-117 CE), fully demonstrated the barbaric ways of the Britons to the Roman mind.
Boudicca's forces were defeated at The Battle of Watling Street by General Gaius Suetonius Paulinus in 61 CE. At the Battle of Mons Graupius, in the region which is now Scotland, the Roman General Gnaeus Julius Agricola won a decisive victory over the Caledonians under Calgacus in 83 CE. Both of these engagements, as well as the uprising in the north in 119 CE (suppressed by the Roman governor and general Quintus Pompeius Falco), substantiated that the Romans were up to the task of managing the indigenous people of Britain.
The suggestion that Hadrian's Wall, then, was built to hold back or somehow control the people of the north does not seem as likely as that it was constructed as a show of force. Hadrian's foreign policy was consistently “peace through strength” and the wall would have been an impressive illustration of that principle. In the same way that Julius Caesar built his famous bridge across the Rhine in 55 BCE simply to show that he, and therefore Rome, could go anywhere and do anything, Hadrian perhaps had his wall constructed for precisely the same purpose.
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the idea that jewish people have no other homes and have only israel to back them serves (& served) antisemites quite a lot. it plays into the idea that hitler was right, german jewish ppl did not belong in germany and were from some other foreign land, that theyre outsiders to germany. this isn't true. german jewish people have every right, the same as any german, to be in their home (germany). it plays into the idea that all jewish people worldwide actually do not have the right to their homelands nor the right to demand a place within their homelands, because their real homeland is israel (historically known as palestine).
when zionism first came to exist as an ideology, it was a fringe ideology that most jewish people opposed for this exact reason: because it hinges on the idea that jewish people do not belong in their home countries, but rather are eternal immigrants or some sort of invaders. from 1882, georg jellinek:
The Jews have sent out their best men to fight for their recognition and equality in the European states and they have marshalled their intellectual resources in numerous writings, on the speaker's platform and in the pulpit for the lofty goal of emancipation. Have they done all this in order to abandon, in this year of 1882, everything they have achieved, to give up all they have fought for and won, to declare that they are aliens, people without a homeland or a fatherland - or, as you put it, vagrants - and, the wanderer's staff in hand, to set out for an uncertain new fatherland? No! That would mean to accept the view of our implacable foes who deny that we have any true patriotic feelings for Europe. In fact, we are not even capable of doing this. We are at home in Europe and regard ourselves as children of the lands in which we were born and raised, whose languages we speak, and whose cultures make up our intellectual substance. We are Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Magyars, Italians and so forth, with every fiber of our being. We have long ceased to be true, thoroughbred Semites, and we have long ago lost the sense of Hebrew nationality.
edwin montagu in 1917, calling the balfour declaration & zionism antisemitic:
I wish to place on record my view that the policy of His Majesty's Government is anti-Semitic in result will prove a rallying ground for Anti-Semites in every country in the world... it seems to be inconceivable that Zionism should be officially recognised by the British Government, and that Mr. Balfour should be authorized to say that Palestine was to be reconstituted as the "national home of the Jewish people". I do not know what this involves, but I assume that it means... that Turks and other Mahommedans in Palestine will be regarded as foreigners, just in the same way as Jews will hereafter be treated as foreigners in every country but Palestine... I assert that there is not a Jewish nation... It is no more true to say that a Jewish Englishman and a Jewish Moor are of the same nation than it is to say that a Christian Englishman and a Christian Frenchman are of the same nation: of the same race, perhaps, traced back through the centuries - through centuries of the history of a peculiarly adaptable race... When the Jews are told that Palestine is their national home, every country will immediately desire to get rid of its Jewish citizens... I claim that the lives that British Jews have led, that the aims that they have had before them, that the part that they have played in our public life and our public institutions, have entitled them to be regarded, not as British Jews, but as Jewish Britons. I would willingly disfranchise every Zionist. I would be almost tempted to proscribe the Zionist organisation as illegal and against the national interest. But I would ask of a British Government sufficient tolerance to refuse a conclusion which makes aliens and foreigners by implication, if not at once by law, of all their Jewish fellow-citizens.... I feel that the Government are asked to be the instrument for carrying out the wishes of a Zionist organisation largely run, as my information goes, at any rate in the past, by men of enemy descent or birth, and by this means have dealt a severe blow to the liberties, position and opportunities of service of their Jewish fellow-countrymen.
balfour himself said in 1919 that zionism is
"a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body [Jewish people] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb."
and therefore even the justification for zionism in the west was about the desire to get rid of their jewish populations, and to have a place to expel their jewish populations to.
robert gessner in 1935 even went as far as equating prominent zionists to nazis & hitler:
The Nationalist Socialists on the other hand are the Revisionists, or the Brown Nazis of Palestine. They believe in the Jewish State 100 percent, with their own Jewish army and even, I might add, a Jewish navy on the Dead Sea! The Fuehrer of the Brown Nazis in Palestine is Vladimir Jabotinsky... Today the young, sternfaced legionnaires of Jabotinsky march through the streets and wear shirts, like their nordic brothers in Germany. In Poland I had seen them marching through the streets (side streets in the ghettoes) singing "Poland for Pilsudski, Germany for Hitler. Palestine for Jews-" The Fuehrer of the Brown Shirted Legions of Judaism is in America because "Revisionism is the genuinest proletarian movement in the world in that it is the poorest." In America about one percent of the Jews are Zionists. What fraction of another one percent will donate money to the Jewish Hitler?
rabbi elmer berger in 1943:
I oppose Zionism because I deny that Jews are a nation …since the Dispersion we have not been a nation. We have belonged to every nation in the world. We have mixed our blood with all peoples. Jewish nationalism is a fabrication woven from the thinnest kinds of threads and strengthened only in those eras of human history in which reaction has been dominant and anti-Semitism in full cry.
rabbi elmer berger also outlined in his work “the jewish dilemma” how zionists held quite antisemitic views.
bevin, another british politician, said in 1946:
"There has been agitation in the United States, and particularly in New York, for 100,000 Jews to be put in Palestine. I hope I will not be misunderstood in America if I say that this was proposed by the purest of motives. They did not want too many Jews in New York."
zionism was also specifically a european, right-wing ideology. left-wing european jews did not believe in it and vehemently opposed it.
so basically, historically, zionism was a far-right ideology that was deemed antisemitic and was equatable to nazism to many jewish people, particularly leftist & communist jewish people. jewish people and non-jewish zionists alike viewed zionism as a means of removing jewish people from their countries.
its baffling that today, the argument is that opposing zionism is hating jewish people, because jewish people themselves overwhelmingly opposed zionism and saw it as antisemitic. to this day jewish anti-zionists continue to exist, yet they face extreme hatred for being against zionism, treated as self-hating traitors.
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After 14 years in power, the Conservatives were punished at the polls for all the tumult that occurred on their watch: Brexit, which most Britons now regret; Johnson’s Partygate scandal, in which the then-prime minister threw parties while the country was under COVID-19 lockdown and lied about them; and the disastrous 2022 budget of Johnson’s successor Liz Truss, which sent shockwaves through financial markets. Britain now has more children in poverty than any other wealthy country, according to the United Nations. Without London, it’s poorer than Mississippi.
For the Conservatives [...] it was the worst defeat in their party’s nearly 200-year history.
The environmentalist Green Party had its most successful election night ever, winning a record four seats
And the far-right, anti-immigrant Reform UK Party will enter Parliament for the first time, with four seats — among them, one for its leader, Brexiteer Nigel Farage, who ran and lost seven times previously.
In Scotland, the once-hegemonic Scottish National Party — which has lobbied for Scottish independence from Britain — was decimated, with Labour taking most of the SNP’s seats.
In Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K, the nationalist Sinn Fein party — which wants Northern Ireland to gain independence from Britain and join the Republic of Ireland to its south — won the most seats, becoming the region’s biggest party in the U.K. Parliament.
#uk politics#uk#britain#ireland#scotland#england#vote damnit#thank you to the brits for voting#hopefully my fellow americans#will join me in following your example
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Princess Grace of Monaco during a press conference on occasion of her participation at the Edinburgh Festival in 1976.
Princess Grace was one of the three performers in a poetry recital entitled “The American Heritage,” arranged as a tribute to the United States Bicentennial. The capacity audience of 300 in Edinburgh's St. Cecilia's Hall gave an enthusiastic reception to readings from poets whose work mirrored the progress of the United States from the earliest Colonial days.
Starting with the works of Anne Bradsheet, one of America's first poets and a Quaker immigrant born in England in 1612, the readings ranged through the 19th‐century classics of American literature to such 20th‐century figures as Carl Sandburg, Ogden Nash, T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost.
Princess Grace seemed completely at home, although she did fluff a couple of her lines. She recovered immediately and only a very attentive listener would have been aware of her mistakes.
Fellow performers included Richard Kiley, the American actor, and Richard Pasco, a Briton. Although their voices displayed a wider range and their dramatization of the readings was superior, their performances did nothing to detract from the real star of the show.
Princess Grace is giving four performances at the festival, and all have been completely sold out for months.
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On YouTube, Matt Walsh responded to violent anti-immigrant riots in the UK by calling immigration "subversive colonization" and giving western colonialism his heartfelt endorsement.
As I mentioned previously during my last post on the anti-immigrant riots in the UK, this whole situation has really exposed the extremist and racist beliefs of the right-wing media machine in the United States. Naturally, Matt Walsh decided to weigh in on the riots and, as anyone who reads this blog knows, any sentence that begins with “Matt Walsh decided to weigh in” never ends well.
02:10, Matt Walsh: "Southport is a seaside town in the northwest of England that looks quite a bit different than it did 20 years ago. There used to be a lot of young people living there for one thing and back in 2001 only around 4% of the population of Southport said they were born outside of the UK, it was a pretty homogeneous place."
According to the most recent data available to me, 95% of the population of Southport is white and 91% were born in the UK. Furthermore, 61.9% of Southport residents identify as Christian with the second largest religious group being atheists.
What this means is that Matt's not only being a racist prick when he pushes the notion that white people are being replaced in Southport, he's straight up lying! Matt and all the other right-wing shitheads like Charlie Kirk and Alex Jones are playing a dangerous game here and all it does is incite further violence in the UK. We're only 2 minutes into the video and this is already a shameful display on Matt's part. Trust me, it somehow gets so much worse.
02:37, Matt Walsh: "Southport's now much older, mainly because young Briton's no longer see much opportunity there. They've been replaced mainly by foreigners. One in ten residents now voluntarily report that they were born outside the UK."
Matt's playing a pretty dishonest game here because that I found that one in ten statistic also....and it's actually about the entire country of Britain. So, Matt's essentially obfuscating the fact that the statistic he's using applies to a way broader swath of the population which conversely is probably why he didn't provide a citation!
03:09, Matt Walsh: "All of these changes have been accompanied by various indignities along the way. Last year for example, British officials floated the idea of housing illegal migrants in Southports Holiday Park because it would be cheaper than paying for hotels."
This is just Matt misunderstanding British dialect because he's a moron.
This story was about the British government floating the plan to potentially house migrants in Southport's now defunct Pontin's Holiday Park. Why is it called "Pontin's Holiday Park" instead of just Holiday Park you ask? Because in Britain the term "Holiday Park" refers to a resort. They were planning on putting migrants in parts of a struggling resort complex, not a literal park like Matt seems to think.
This is the quality you get at Daily Wire. Some smug blowhard completely butchering a news story he's trying to cover either because he didn't research the story enough or because he's willfully lying to the audience.
We're only two minutes in and Matt's already messed up; the population demographics of Southport, his big statistic about Southport that was really about the entire nation of England, and now this story about the government planning to give migrants a public park that was really just another hotel. If you took Matt Walsh seriously in the past, let this be a wakeup call.
03:36, Matt Walsh: "That episode was pretty clear indication that Southport's decline was not accidental, it was deliberate. That's why the British government doesn't see a flood of illegal immigrants as a problem, they see it as an opportunity to shut down the local park."
The local park that wasn't even a park to begin with but go off Matt.
How does this conspiracy even make sense internally? Matt admitted that the plan to convert the "park" fell through so were the people that vetoed it the few good parts of the government that don't want British people to suffer? This might also come off as a shock to Matt but governments have goals other than making their citizens miserable. Government officials aren't sitting at some big table rubbing their hands together plotting new ways to make people miserable and make small towns decline, it's just not a thing that happens outside of cartoons. To be fair to Matt, at this point cartoons probably are his primary news source given how informed he seems to be about this whole situation.
03:59, Matt Walsh: "That's true even after the massacre that took place on July 29th. Police say that a seventeen year old man entered a dance studio in Southport that was hosting a Taylor Swift themed workshop for young children. Armed with a knife he allegedly murdered three girls, ages six, seven and, nine and seriously injured ten others including eight children."
And that's absolutely tragic. It also makes Matt Walsh and the right-wing media ecospheres exploitation of this event to push white-nationalist dogma against immigrants even more disgusting and wrong. Don't get it twisted, Matt Walsh and the rest of the right-wing media ecosystem are using the deaths of children to push hatred and stoke violence in the UK and it's sickening to watch.
So, Matt plays videos of the riots and then proceeds to give his take on the events. Keep in mind that this is a man who is still crying about the BLM protests being "violent riots" to this very day.
06:07, Matt Walsh: "So, competent leaders, people who care about the future of their country, would look at scenes of civil disorder like this and ask themselves why exactly it's happening. Its not enough to shake your fist and say that committing crimes during mass protests is a bad thing, although generally it is a bad thing."
But none of that applies when black people are being killed by the cops, got it Matt. To be fair, he does briefly attempt to acknowledge how dumb this line of thinking is coming from him.
06:25, Matt Walsh: "That doesn't address the problem and to do that it's important to figure out why people are so upset that they're willing to commit crimes in broad daylight. Is it because they've bought into years of lies about so called police violence against black people culminating in false narratives about life-long criminals like George Floyd, Jacob Blake and many others? That was the impetus for BLM as we all know."
We've talked about police brutality many times on this blog but just a quick recap of the numbers:
Black people are two times more likely to be pulled over by police officers than white drivers despite being less likely to be carrying illegal contraband, except for at night (what's more likely? Black people are just calmer drivers at night or that this is because cops can't see the drivers race?).
Black people are also two times more likely to get shot by the police than white people. This is despite them only making up 13% of the US population.
Furthermore, black people are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by the police when they aren't attacking or have a weapon.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. So yes, there is a problem with police brutality in America despite what Matt Walsh will tell you. Not content with dismissing the dangers of police brutality, Matt proceeds to defend January 6th.
06:48, Matt Walsh: "Or is it because, as was the case with January 6th, people didn't buy into government lies about lockdowns and mail in voting and Russian collusion culminating in an election in which Joe Biden somehow won millions more votes than Barrack Obama did in 2008."
I've talked about the "Biden won more votes than Obama" thing before but in essence, yes Biden won more votes than Obama in 2008 but won several less counties than Obama. What gave Biden the edge was record turnout in urban areas. In 2008, 61.6% of the eligible population voted in the election whereas in 2020 66.2% of the population voted. As a matter of fact, the Global Elections Project estimates that 27 million more people voted in the 2020 election than in 2008. This applies to both Trump and Biden by the way. When more people vote you get a higher turnout, it's that simple.
But what Matt's saying here should be crystal clear at this point: you shouldn't be allowed to protest unless its for a cause that he approves of or unless you are white. Notice how Matt just casually wrote off a primarily black protest whilst whitewashing a primarily white riot at a government building. If J6 was carried out by BLM protestors we'd never be hearing the end of it from Matt, but since its his side they're simply people who "didn't buy into government lies". It's a ridiculous double standard and requires insane amounts of mental gymnastics to take seriously.
07:04, Matt Walsh: "Or is it because, as is the case in Southport, people are tired of the decades long government effort to reengineer the demographics of their country."
As I pointed out last time we covered the riots in the UK, the population of England is 82% white. If there has been a decades long project to "reengineer the demographics of England", the government is doing a terrible job of it. This is just Great Replacement Theory nonsense that can be debunked in about twelve seconds.
Matt plays a clip of British prime-minister Keir Starmer stating that there's going to be a crackdown on the riots and then decides to attempt a gotcha.
09:12, Matt Walsh: "Now, through all of this Keir Starmer claims that he's not motivated in any way by the prospect of shutting down criticism of his countries open borders policies. Instead he says that he's really upset about civil disorder in general. Anytime protests turn to arson or violence, Keir Starmer says he's opposed to it."
Matt then plays a clip of Keir Starmer saying he's opposed to violence of any kind and stating that the UK riots aren't protest. However, Keir *gasp* endorsed BLM four years ago. He plays that clip.
11:56, Matt Walsh: "Ok, so you get the idea. You get the idea. Very different -- but slightly different tone. Can we agree on that? Maybe a slightly different tone between the two riots?"
Woah Matt, imagine having a different tone about two different riots. Wow, can't imagine that. Good thing you don't act hypocritically about these kinds of situations and condemn January 6th and these anti-immigrant riots, right Matt?!
By the way, 93% of BLM protests have been peaceful whereas these anti-immigrant riots have categorically been violent so this narrative that Matt's trying to build about BLM isn't even supported by facts.
12:07, Matt Walsh: "Starmer was talking like this several days after BLM protests in London resulted in injuries to more than two dozen police officers and this was after the BLM violence that I mentioned in the United States. The message was clear, violence for state approved purposes is fine but descent that humiliates the state and exposes its failures will be crushed."
If police being injured is the red line for Matt Walsh, he should be condemning the anti-immigrant riots left and right. During the anti-immigrant riots, more than one hundred police officers have been injured as opposed to the BLM protests in London which saw a total of 27 officers hurt. It's clear which movement is more violent towards cops.
12:47, Matt Walsh: "The idea is that because this killer reportedly was born in Britain to Rwandan parents the protests must be illegitimate. Now, pause for moment to consider the extraordinary degree of irony here. The same people who tell white Briton's and white American's that they're colonizers and oppressors, people living on land that their ancestors conquered hundreds if not thousands of years ago, are now telling the same white Britons and Americans that they have no right to be upset about the flood of third world migrants colonizing their country."
This is so dumb.
First of all, nobody is saying that modern white Americans themselves are colonizers. What we're saying is that it's important to acknowledge the historical atrocities carried out by colonizers in the past if only because it helps us understand where we are today. Especially since Native Americans are still treated like trash by the US government.
Second of all, how is modern immigration remotely close to colonization? Immigrants and even undocumented immigrants aren't barging in and slaughtering every white person they see in an effort to conquer the country, most are simply trying to live their lives.
Matt then remembers that he actually likes colonialism and decides to just spew out white nationalist dog whistles and defend colonialism for the rest of the segment.
13:35, Matt Walsh: "But what we have now is a colonization by subversion, its a subversive colonization. Colonization orchestrated by the elites of the country that is being colonized. Its a kind of self-imposed colonization not done for the purposes of spreading civilization which is why the Europeans did it but done for the purpose of destroying civilization."
What he's basically saying, if you cut through the dog-whistles, is that white people are civilized and non-white people aren't. Its blatantly obvious if you process it for more than twelve seconds.
I'm not the only one who's noticed this either, open white nationalists have noticed that Matt Walsh seems to endorse their rhetoric quite a bit on his show. In April 2021, white nationalist and political extremist Vincent James Foxx gloated that Matt Walsh is "beginning to sound like us" while reading a tweet that Walsh sent out about white people "not being allowed to be proud of their identity" in America.
Lest we forget that the thing that Matt is saying here is also stupid as all hell. America wasn't colonized by the Europeans to "spread civilization", it was colonized primarily for its resources, forcibly spread Christianity, find new routes to nations like Asia, and take more land. The colonizers killed and displaced the people that lived here before us, it was a brutal genocide and if you know anything about history you would know that this effort on Matt's part to whitewash it is completely ahistorical.
13:58, Matt Walsh: "European colonizers, for hundreds of years, brought civilization to uncivilized lands."
The way that Matt talks about colonization makes it sound like absolutely nobody was living there before and the Europeans just came in and tamed this untamed wild land. That's simply not true, there were people there and the Europeans brutally slaughtered them. Notice how Matt isn't even saying what the colonizers actually did in his bizarre little rant. Its just thinly veiled "white people good, everyone else bad" BS and genocide apologetics.
14:05, Matt Walsh: "In this case, uncivilized people are bringing chaos, poverty, and lawlessness to previously civilized societies. Very different kind."
Again, this is just extremely mask-off racism on the part of Matt which sounds almost identical to rhetoric I covered last week that was pushed by open white-nationalist Laura Loomer. Absolutely zero proof backing up what Matt's saying.
So, Matt reads a tweet from a left-wing activist and whinges about that for a bit. I don't really give a shit about Matt analyzing some random tweet from some person who I've never heard of as if its the opinion of every single person on the planet except for him and his fans. Then he decides to complain more about BLM, surprise surprise.
17:13, Matt Walsh: "And no, the same logic does not apply to BLM. Reasonable person are capable of distinguishing between the BLM riots and the civil disorder taking place in the UK."
Agreed, Matt really is an extremely unreasonable person isn't he? In all seriousness, these riots in the UK are categorically way more violent than the BLM protests back in 2020. We've seen bricks getting thrown at police officers and buildings were set on fire. These riots were sparked by racist disinformation like what Matt's spreading here and now people are getting hurt as a result.
Conclusion:
This episode had everything. Extremely disturbing white nationalist rhetoric, Matt demonstrably having zero idea what he's talking about, and genocide apologetics. Even by Matt Walsh standards this is really fucking bad and it just goes to show you how much the riots in the UK have peeled the mask off of the American far-right.
Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.
Original Video:
“Ep. 1416 - People Have Finally Had Enough of the Illegal Immigrant Takeover.” Dailywire.com, The Daily Wire, 6 Aug. 2024.
Sources Cited:
“Southport (Merseyside, North West England, United Kingdom) - Population Statistics, Charts, Map, Location, Weather and Web Information.” Citypopulation.de.
PTI. “One in 10 People “Living in Britain Born Abroad.”” The Economic Times, Economic Times.
Grierson, Jamie. “Home Office Shelves Plans to House Asylum Seekers in Southport Pontins.” The Guardian, 3 Feb. 2023.
Bennett, Jordan. “Research Shows Black Drivers More Likely to Be Stopped by Police.” NYU.
“A “Veil of Darkness” Reduces Racial Bias in Traffic Stops.” News.stanford.edu.
Bunn, Curtis. “Black People Are Still Killed by Police at a Higher Rate than Other Groups.” NBC News, NBC Universal, 3 Mar. 2022.
Ray, Rashawn. “How Can We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States?” Brookings, 25 Aug. 2020.
Greenberg, Jon. “Obama’s and Biden’s Vote Totals: A Flawed Comparison.” Politifact, 2020.
GOV.UK. “Ethnicity Facts and Figures.” Www.ethnicity-Facts-Figures.service.gov.uk, 2021
Mansoor, Sanya. “93% of Black Lives Matter Protests Have Been Peaceful, New Report Finds.” Time, Time USA, 5 Sept. 2020.
King, Becca. “Why Did Settlers Come to America? The Colonial Mindset.” Shortform Books, 23 Jan. 2024.
#right wing bullshit#journalism#uk politics#uk riots#southport#disinformation#fact checking#bad takes#politics#debunking#daily wire#uk#fuck racism#white supremism#fuck white supremacy#matt walsh
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January 26th marks Australia Day.
Scots played many key parts in the story of Australia, we were convicts, soldiers and governors; orphans, free settlers and gold hunters; bushrangers, merchants and immigrants.
Although it is sometimes said of nineteenth-century Sydney that it was an English city, in contrast with the more Scottish city of Melbourne, people of Scottish origin have played important roles in the development and life of Sydney. They have been there from the very beginning.
For hundreds of years Scots have packed up their families and their belongings and sailed to Australia to start a new life.
When Australia needed workers between 1832 and 1850 about 16,000 Scots became ‘assisted immigrants’. They boarded chartered ships, like the 50-ton ship Stirling Castle, chartered from Alan Kerr and Company, Greenock, alongside skilled stonemasons, engineers, carpenters, blacksmiths and even professors. In the same period more than 20,000 Scots travelled to Australia as unassisted immigrants.
The majority of Scottish emigrants were from the Lowlands but around 10,000 Highlanders boarded chartered ships to Australia between 1837 and 1852.
The 20th century continued to see Scots migrate to Australia. In the 1920s Scots stonemasons helped to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Scots miners from Lanarkshire, Fife and Ayrshire worked in coal mines in New South Wales in the '20s and '30s. In 1929 Alexander MacRae, originally from Loch Kishorn in the Highlands, first produced the famous Australian swimming ‘cossie’ - Speedos.
In 1930 MacRobertson Chocolates created Freddo Frog. Macpherson Robertson, the founder of ‘Mac Robertson Steam Confectionery Works’ that later became simply MacRobertson Chocolates, was the son of a Scottish carpenter. He spent many of his early years in Leith and became an apprentice at a confectionery company. When his family moved back to Melbourne he started making sweets in his mother’s bathroom.
Robertson became a great philanthropist as well as a hugely successful chocolate maker. He sponsored the MacRobertson Air Race from London to Melbourne, and financed a combined British, Australian and New Zealand expedition to the Antarctic. A part of the Antarctic was named ‘Mac Robertson Land’ in his honour.
Today Freddo Frog is the most popular children’s chocolate in Australia.
After the Second World War thousands of Britons set sail for Australia. Between 1947 and 1981 more than a million Britons took advantage of an assisted passage scheme introduced by the Australian Government. Around 170,000 Scots left the country of their birth to become ‘Ten Pound Poms’ and start a new life Down Under.
During the past 24 hours there have been protests in Australia as part of a campaign to move Australia day to a date more fitting to the indigenous people of the country, names they give to January 26th include Survival Day, Invasion Day, Day of Mourning.
Gammeya Dharawal man, Jacob Morris, said there isn’t one emotion that fully captures the day.
"It's a day of teaching. It's a day of celebrating as well. We're not up there celebrating the Union Jack, we're celebrating us," he says.
But the day also reminds Jacob of the treatment of First Nations people throughout history.
"Anger … that is still what is felt today and that comes from the sadness, trauma and the hurt," he said.
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"In Imperial Island, Charlotte Lydia Riley shows us that Empire’s legacy is soaked into Britain’s landscapes and built into its cities. From immigrant woes and racial tensions to the way in which imperial mindsets still color relations among black, white, and brown Britons, Empire is inescapably in the country’s national DNA. An eye-opening study of the Empire within."
#uwlibraries#history books#british history#imperial history#urban history#racial history#20th century
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Bengiyo's Queer Cinema Syllabus
For those who are not aware, I have decided to run the gauntlet of @bengiyo’s Queer Cinema Syllabus and have officially started Unit 2: Race, Disability, and Class. The films in Unit 2 are: The Way He Looks (2014), Being 17 (2016), Naz and Maalik (2015), The Obituary of Tunde Johnson (2019), Margarita With a Straw (2014), My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Brother to Brother (2004), and Beautiful Thing (1996)
Today I will be writing about
My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) dir. Stephen Frears
[Run Time: 1:37, Available- Amazon, Hulu, Language: English]
Summary: “An ambitious Pakistani Briton and his white boyfriend strive for success and hope when they open a glamorous laundromat.” (from IMDB)
Cast: * Daniel Day-Lewis as Johnny * Gordon Warnecke as Omar
___
Hmm. Okay so, before I get too far in to this, I feel like this film was the hardest one for me to follow from a plot standpoint (so far). There were a lot of little things happening that took a bit for me to really understand, and that caused some challenges in how I engaged with this film. I will admit at this point that this was a movie I probably need more historical context for (ie some of the political commentary in the film, the state of Britain at the point in which this film was made, etc.) but my brain is fried from life stuff, and I do not have the energy to do that research right now.
gif by @itsmyfriendisaac
Fundamentally, I do think there is something extremely interesting in the role reversals here of the Pakistani immigrant family being the richer, more successful characters, compared to the white people in the film. And this makes sense because what I was able to get through the movie is the racism that came out of Pakistani immigrants moving to Britain, establishing lives, and then becoming the scapegoats for the suffering of poor white people (when obviously they are not the actual problem).
Omar comes alive at the thought of getting to make something out of his life, rather than just be a caretaker for his father. A father who has become a victim to the racism and vitriol he has witnessed in Britain. A man who gave compassion, advice, care to young white boys only to see them march against him when they grew up.
I loved the visual commentary about how women can be forgotten, every time that Nasser’s wife walked by a room, quiet, unnoticed, and soaking in all this information about Omar, Tania, and Nasser’s affair.
I did love the visual commentary around ever looming danger. This standstill that Johnny’s old crew came to with Johnny, Omar, and the laundrette. A show of numbers, a threat of violence, that never triggered because there was no reason to do so. Johnny still had power and influence over his white friends, and that kept them quiet. But they loom. They are an ever present danger that Omar just ignores. Omar and Johnny continue to live their lives, build out the laundrette, try to achieve success despite the ever present danger. Which is as strong as a visual metaphor you can get towards existing as a part of one or more oppressed groups.
I like that fundamentally, Omar did all of this to show his Dad that he could be successful. Because he wanted to show his father that everything he’d heard said about him by the white boys he went to school with, and by Britain were wrong. That he was successful, and he had white people working for him. And how that is only revealed when Omar and Johnny have done the work of selling coke, refurbishing the entire place, and then opening it. I like that Omar’s father does not consider his son opening this laundrette as a success, because he wants Omar to be educated. Because he understands the importance of education, and how a lack of education makes people susceptible to propaganda. I also appreciate that Omar was spared from hearing that.
I love that Omar and Johnny’s feelings for eachother are never really disguised. Like, if you are queer, you can see from the second they are reunited that those two have almost certainly fucked before. But that good old fashioned heteronormativity is what really seems to shield them from suspicion by most people (besides Tania it seems).
And for as brutal of a beating as it was, I did genuinely enjoy the scene both for the commentary around how no one really is ever safe. That once your former in-group decides you are now part of the out-group, you are no longer safe. And further, that Omar very adamantly, casually, and happily took care of Johnny and treated his wounds and did not let him leave because he does love Johnny. I love that the film ends with the two of them in the laundrette, with Omar kissing the back of Johnny’s neck, in front of a couple shattered windows. Why? Because for me, it speaks volumes about how Omar views his relationship to Johnny and the world. He treats Johnny rather than worrying about his laundrette, because he loves Johnny, and Johnny is hurt. The windows can be replaced.
gif by @oscarskirt
For/By/About
By and About
The writer of the film is bisexual, and the main characters are queer, which puts it in a By and About Queers category. I am on the fence about the For Queer people, because again, with most of the films in Unit 2, I feel like the Race, Disability, and Class aspects of the film are more of the central voice. For My Beautiful Laundrette, the race and class aspects seem like the heavier hitters, but the reason I’m on the fence is because there are some aspects of Johnny and Omar’s relationship that aren’t verbalized that I feel like may only be picked up on (easily) by a queer audience.
Favorite Scene
gif by @eriklehnsherryes
I really loved the scene where Johnny and Omar are fucking in the back room while Nessan and Rachel are dancing inside the laundrette. I appreciated that it felt like it was used to highlight the legitimacy of both of their relationships/love for one another. And that both fucking (and spitting champagne in to Omar’s mouth) could be presented in a way that felt romantic because it was paralleled to a couple dancing lovingly together.
Favorite Quote
“We must all have knowledge if we are to see what is being done to whom in this country”
A quote said by Omar’s dad to Johnny. I like it because it addresses what I think is the core of this film. And it shows in very few words, why he ended up this way, why he wants Omar to go to college, and where his ideology and life experience lies.
Score
8/10
I think this film falls to the classic blunder of trying to say too many things in too short of a time. As a result, we only get glimpses in to characters, and it is harder for me to see and understand their motivations.
#queer cinema syllabus#bengiyo queer cinema syllabus#my beautiful laundrette#my beautiful laundrette (1985)
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Cheddar Man is a human male fossil found in Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England. The skeletal remains date to the Mesolithic (ca. 9100 BP) and it appears that he died a violent death. A large crater-like lesion just above the skull’s right orbit suggests that the man may have also been suffering from a bone infection.
Excavated in 1903 in Gough’s Cave in Somerset, Cheddar Man is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton. The remains are kept by the Natural History Museum in London in the new Human Evolution gallery.[1]
Intense speculation has built up around Cheddar Man’s origins and appearance because he lived shortly after the first settlers crossed from continental Europe to Britain at the end of the last ice age.
It was initially assumed that Cheddar Man had pale skin and fair hair, but his DNA paints a different picture, strongly suggesting he had blue eyes, a very dark brown to black complexion and dark curly hair.
The discovery shows that the genes for lighter skin became widespread in European populations far later than originally thought – and that skin colour was not always a proxy for geographic origin in the way it is often seen to be
Analysis of his nuclear DNA indicates that he was a typical member of the western European population at the time, probably with lactose intolerance, dark skin, blue eyes, and dark curly or wavy hair.[2]
Nuclear DNA sequence data
Nuclear DNA was extracted from the petrous part of the temporal bone by a team from the Natural History Museum in 2018.[3] The genetic markers suggested (based on their associations in modern populations whose phenotypes are known) that he probably had blue eyes, lactose intolerance, dark curly or wavy hair, and, less certainly,[3][4] dark to very dark skin.[2][5] These features are typical of the European population of the time, now known as West European Hunter-Gatherers. This population forms about 10%, on average, of the ancestry of Britons without a recent family history of immigration.[2]
The mitochondrial DNA of Cheddar Man was of haplogroup U5b1.[2] Some 65% of western European Mesolithic hunter-gatherers had haplogroup U5; today it is widely distributed, at lower frequencies, across western Eurasia and northern Africa. In 1996, Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford first sequenced the mitochondrial DNA from one of Cheddar Man’s molars.[7][8][9]
There was no genetic link with the other skeletons from Gough’s Cave, which are 5,000 years older than Cheddar Man. For much of this intervening period, the last glaciation of Europe had made the area unsuitable for human life.
Genetic change in Britain since the Mesolithic:
Britain was periodically settled and then cleared during ice ages until the end of the last glacial period about 11,700 years ago, since when it has been continuously inhabited.
Until now, though, it hasn’t been clear whether each wave of migrants was seeded from the same population in mainland Europe; the latest results suggest this was not the case.
The team homed in on genes known to be linked to skin colour, hair colour and texture, and eye colour. For skin tone, there are a handful of genetic variants linked to reduced pigmentation, including some that are very widespread in European populations today. However, Cheddar Man had “ancestral” versions of all these genes, strongly suggesting he would have had “dark to black” skin tone, but combined with blue eyes.
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Okay – so! Thank you for all that you do for fandom and The History side of tumblr- it’s a LOT.
I’m struggling with mapping a historical accuracy/fanon vs. canon concept. I hope you can help me untangle my thoughts on this. Diverse representation in media is very important to me; and I’m also aware of the damage that the ‘colour-blind’ casting can do. So! I’m trying to reconcile a common fandom perception that Hob Gadling is of South-East Asian decent. (I know that Ferdie is!- I also have seen zero evidence that he claims Desi Diaspora as part of his identity. It makes me really uncomfortable that fandom might be projecting their desire for ‘Representation’ onto a man who lives outside his ancestral culture.)
What I do know is that Hob is a medieval freeman (?) from the south of England in the 1300s. I wonder at the possibility of his CHARACTER being of mixed race? I know that Briton and Europe and Africa were in trade. I know that People of colour moved freely around the continents!
I’ve done some research into London population polls from the time, but I’m not certain of their degree of accuracy/usefulness. They describe immigrants as ‘aliens’.. and most I’ve seen are European. I haven’t even come across evidence of Muslim or ‘Moorish’ people settling in London???!
The written history I’ve read tells me the Europeans didn’t establish trade with India until the mid 1400s. (How it’s possible they didn’t know about each other is Baffling and seems impossible??) Anyway. The crux of the matter is: would Hob Gadling possibly been of mixed heritage?
I mean yes, technically, he COULD be. The most logical route for that would be to give him some family heritage from somewhere in Spain, or Iberia, which was a fully mixed-race society until well into the 13th/14th century, and was in regular trade and communication with England. The medieval Iberian Christian kingdoms of Castile-León, Aragon, and Navarre particularly were close trading partners and English/Iberian royalty married each other fairly often. It was somewhat less the case by the time Hob was born in the 1350s, but there is certainly enough previous contact to make it feasible. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived in Iberia (how much they all co-existed has long been one of the most debated questions in religious/historical studies), and Muslims had a presence in Spain for over 700 years, since the first arrivals in 711 CE following the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad, until their final expulsion under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.
The question, however, is if he SHOULD be headcanoned or identified as mixed-race, and while I am the least fandom-policey person ever and respect people's right to enjoy their own ideas in peace, it personally makes me a little uncomfortable. It feels related to the "fandom activism!" mindset where you should ship a more Morally Pure OTP, or your favorite is "better" if they can be somehow identified with a marginalized group, regardless of whether this fits or makes sense for the character. And in this case, Hob’s background as a good-looking white British bloke with an appropriately English-sounding name, as I describe him in AITWW, is central to both his character arc, his major mistakes, and how he has to learn and grow over time. It was absolutely vital to me that in AITWW, he had to explicitly confront the massive amounts of unearned privilege that he enjoyed over the centuries by being born into that body, and how it would be very different for him if he hadn't been. As his friend Julia puts it in their discussion in chapter 13, he had the luck to be born into a body that society automatically privileges and values and places into positions of power whether or not he deserves it, and as a black woman, she thinks immortality sounds absolutely awful. Why would she want to put up with the absolute shit it would be to live 600 years, at least in the Western world/America/Europe, in that embodiment?
Likewise, Hob agrees and admits that of course it's easy for him to want to live forever and maintain enthusiasm for life, because whatever difficulties he has faced, his race and gender have not contributed to them (which is the essence of white privilege in a nutshell). And of course, the urge to make him mixed-race might reflect some discomfort with his actual canon background and involvement in slavery, no matter if he obviously feels terribly guilty and driven to atone for over 200 years after that (as he SHOULD). In some sense, making him mixed-race might seem to mitigate that or give some reason to make him "sympathetic" while he was doing it, and frankly, I don't think 18th-century Hob deserves to get off the hook for being yet another British white man who might have felt bad about what he was doing at times, but continued to do it anyway. I'm not saying this is anyone's motive or intention, but it does trouble me, especially since Hob’s whiteness, the damage of that whiteness, and the way he has to deliberately and extensively unlearn that urge to just live life on easy mode regardless of the damage it does to others is what I find so interesting about his character. In short, if Hob was part of a racially marginalized group already, he might have made different choices, but he didn't, and now he is forced to literally live with that guilt and shame forever. He doesn't get to exonerate himself, and nor do I do it for him.
Lastly, I think this reflects a very modern and somewhat over-simplified way of thinking; to our modern and institutionally-racist-pickled brains, race is the chief category that can be explicitly constructed as Otherness, and doesn't reflect the very unclear way this was perceived and experienced in the 14th century. I.e., you note that immigrants to England "were mostly European" -- which is true, but does not reflect the dizzying array then as now, in which local, national, ethnic, and religious identities were constructed. One unattractive feature of the English national character over many centuries has been their hostility and distrust of foreigners, and this was especially the case in the 14th and especially late-14th, post-Black Plague society. For example, the Flemish were regarded as "morally inferior" since they ran several well-known brothels and red-light districts in Southwark, across the Thames from London (now part of the city), and that meant they were purveying immorality, rather than being there since the English desired their services. Xenophobia was especially rampant against "strangers" of any type, especially against Jews again post-Black Death for sadly predictable anti-Semitic reasons, and even being from continental Europe would not have made someone "English" in their eyes. Even by the Elizabethan era, it was almost impossible for a foreign-born citizen (or "denizen," meaning something akin to "permanent resident") to get licensed as a guildsman in the city of London, and without that license, you could not run a business, practice a trade, or engage in substantial paid work in any way.
Likewise, medieval notions of race were fluid, uncertain, and often linked to religion more than ethnic origin. There are several Arthurian legendarium reworkings, and epic poems such as The King of Tars, where the "happy" ending is that the mixed-race, Muslim, or black hero is converted to Christianity and abandons whatever untrue pagan religion he has been following before. This is often accompanied with a literal physical transformation turning him from black- or dark-skinned (impure) to white (pure). So yes, racial thinking and categories did exist, but it wasn't seen as fixed or unalterable, and again, wasn't really the first or primary way in which Otherness was constructed (compared to say, "Saracen," which functioned throughout almost the entire medieval era as a marker of difference and had varied racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic connotations, but originally came from the term for Muslims).
So anyway: hopefully that all makes sense and provides some context in both my historical and fandom thinking on the matter. Thanks for the question!
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British troops attacking Maryland in 1814 (Star Spangled Banner National Historic Trail)
Both sides regarded the [War of 1812] as a second act in a drama launched by the American Revolution. During the new war, some British officers called the Americans “rebels,” as if they had not truly won their independence and the revolution was not yet lost to the empire. Because of the cultural overlap between Americans and Britons, similar people fought on both sides. British immigrants lived throughout the United States, and British forces included many sons of the Loyalist refugees from the revolution. “It is quite shocking to have men who speak our own language brought in wounded; one feels as if they were English peasants, and that we are killing our own people,” declared one British officer posted in the Chesapeake. He added, “There are numbers of officers, of the navy in particular, whose families are American, and their fathers in one or two instances are absolutely living in the very towns we are trying to burn.”
— Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
The theme of feeling uncomfortable about attacking culturally similiar Americans—and their ships crewed by mostly British sailors—is a recurring one in British memoirs of the War of 1812. But it wasn't much of a deterrent to Admiral Sir George Cockburn, who repeatedly pillaged the Chesapeake region (before and after setting the White House on fire).
This 1813 print shows Admiral Cockburn and his entourage of sailors and Royal Marines burning and plundering Havre de Grace, Maryland (Brown University collection). For a partisan depiction of events no great atrocities are depicted, but we do get... REDCOATS ROBBING A CRADLE.
Those dastardly Brits! No baby cradle is safe! Alternate versions of this print go for an even more comic approach:
#War of 1812 Wednesday#war of 1812#age of sail#royal navy#redcoats#royal marines#sir george cockburn#chesapeake campaign#military history#canadians reading this are thinking 'WE actually robbed that baby cradle'
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“The True measure of our wealth is how much we’d be worth if we lost all our money.” – J.H.Jowett
The Byline Times carried this headline on 18th January 2024
“Reform UK Limited: The Political Business Brought to You by Billionaires.”
I have always been somewhat surprised why so many of the British electorate vote for Nigel Farage. He is not a “man of the people”, he rarely speaks “common sense" and he breaks his political promises as often as Sir Keir Starmer. (We all remember the slogan, “We send the EU £350 million a week. Lets fund our NHS” that turned out to be either a "mistake" as Farage later described it, or a deliberate lie, depending on your point of view.)
There are two themes that run throughout Forages political career – accusations of racism and his love of money.
Lets take racism:
Farage’s infamous anti-immigration poster of 2016 was described by George Osbourne as both “vile" and reminiscent of “nazi propaganda”. Farage is a master at promoting feelings of “us” and “them”, the polarizing political rhetoric that pits one group of people against another.
Despite claiming to “hate” the EU, its institutions, its personnel and its policies, Nigel Farage was a member of the European Parliament for 21 years, raking in a small fortune while doing so. (More of this later) He very successfully used the language of “hatred” to persuade the British people to leave the EU but at the same time created a problem for himself as he also scuppered his earning potential. Having defeated the bullying EU he needed to create a new enemy to rail against – Muslims.
Sky News (27/05/24:
“Nigel Farage called out for 'blanket accusation' as he says 'growing number' of Muslims 'loathe' British values.
And LBC said:
“Farage defends Reform UK candidates after anti-Islam and far-right comments exposed." (13/06/24)
Farage’s anti-Muslim position had been known for many years. In 2013 Farage claimed Muslim migrants were “coming here to take us over". But since leaving the EU it has taken on new significance, Muslims being an easily identifiable group for the particular brand of "hatred" politics that Farage peddles in order to make money.
Let us suppose for arguments sake Farage actually believes what he says about Muslims trying to “take over Britain” and “loathing British values”. The question then arises as to why he has handed the Chairmanship of the Reform UK party to a Muslim millionaire.
Before the last election Reform UK accepted hundreds of thousands of pounds from very wealthy individuals, the largest donor being Muslim.
“The precise amount Zia Yusuf has given to the party has not been disclosed but Reform UK claims it is the biggest donation of their general election campaign so far." (BBC News: 19/06/24)
Two months later and Zia Yusaf has been made chairman of Reform UK. If Muslims are intent on “taking over" Britain what better way than becoming Chairman of Britons fastest growing political party? But why would Farage open the door to a “takeover” by the very people he claims loath British values?
The answer is of course money. When you “donate” millions to a political party you expect something in return. And for Farage money has always been of primary concern regardless of ethics.
Reform UK is backed by billionaires and millionaires because they feel it will protect their interests. Nigel Farage does not really care about the so-called “Muslim threat” anymore than he hated the EU. Farage’s primary concern is funding his ever-growing bank account that being a controversial figure in the political limelight allows him to do.
The 21 years that Farage was a member of the despicable European Parliament he was paid approximately £2.2 million before tax (£1.7 million after tax). In 2018, Esquire magazine (21/08/18) revealed that Farage was living in a £4 million Chelsea town house, and was paid nearly £1million pounds for his broadcasting contracts on top of his job as an MEP. That isn’t all. As a retiring MEP Mr Farage was entitled to an extra payment of £152,000 before tax, and a massive pension of £73,000 per year. Strange that Mr Farage had told the Daily Mail only months earlier that he was “skint” and that there was “no money in politics”.
It is money that drives Farage not political conviction. It is no wonder that the Financial Times (17/08/24) reported that:
“Nigel Farage is Britain’s highest earning MP, Common records reveal."
Farage has been absent from his Clacton constituency and not holding constituency surgeries on the pretext "the public will flow through the doors with knives in their pockets”. A more plausible explanation might be he has been too busy in America supporting Donald Trump and raking in huge sums of money for his speaking events.
The Independent (17/08/24) revealed Farage is pocketing £98,000 a month from his various political activities this year. Stoking political and social division pays very nicely it seems. His anti-EU, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, credentials have kept him firmly in the media spotlight, and this has provided him the opportunity to feather his own nest regardless of the economic cost to the nation regards Brexit, or the social cost regards his anti-immigration, anti-Muslim stance. Where making money takes precedence over all things is it any wonder that Reform UK is the party of billionaires.
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I recently found out that American schools taught languages at the same rate at European schools up until 1917, when it entered WW1. That was a time of ultra-nationalism for all participant countries, and in the United States that took the form of 23 states making German illegal: it was forbidden to speak German in public, broadcast in German on the radio, or teach German to a child under the age of 10. That might not seem significant to modern Americans, but in those days German was the second most spoken language in the USA, something like Spanish today.
In 1923 the states that banned German repealed those laws, but by then the damage was done. Americans expected to only speak English, expected immigrants to only speak English, and saw no reason for schools to require kids to learn a new language. It also so happened that WWI was the beginning of the end for the use of German as an international language in science (and probably some other things but I'm apparently a STEM chauvinist).
It didn't have to be this way. What if American schools continued to teach languages at the same rate as European schools? All countries in the EU require students to learn at least one additional language in school, with many requiring two languages, and some more multilingual EU countries (like Andorra) require students to learn three additional languages in school. Because lots of languages are spoken in the United States, I imagine that if American schools still taught languages at the same rates as European schools, it might be more like one of Andorra. For example, perhaps all English-medium American schools would have mandatory Spanish classes for all K-12 students, add mandatory ASL classes in fourth grade, and then students would add an additional language in seventh grade, let's say choice of Hindi, Arabic, Russian, or Korean. This does cause issues because there's only so much time in the school day and kids also need to learn mathematics, science, history, art, coding (yes, coding is an essential skill today, but that's another topic). There's also the issue that even in the EU, school language classes can be "learn and forget". Still, it sure is nice to imagine what if Americans weren't notoriously monolingual and ignorant.
By the way, I assume WWI is also the reason why Britons are notoriously monolingual, too. They were rabidly nationalistic during WWI and rejected anything to do with "the enemy". I read that during WWI one British school was asked to justify why they still taught German and they justified it as "know the enemy".
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Small boat arrivals fell by third last year
The UK Home Office published the latest figures on illegal migration and asylum claims on Thursday. There were 38,784 illegal arrivals in the 12 months to June 2024, representing a 26% drop from the previous year.
Of these, 81%, or 31,493, made the dangerous journey across the Channel in small boats. This figure is 29% lower than the 44,460 arrivals on small boats in the year ending June 2023.
Despite the overall drop in numbers, the average number of people per boat rose to 51, up from 44 in the previous year, suggesting that smugglers are increasingly cramming more people onto each vessel.
While the government continues to grapple with the complexities of managing migration, the number of people awaiting an initial decision on their asylum claims remains a key issue.
By the end of June 2024, 118,882 people were still awaiting an initial decision, a slight increase from 118,329 at the end of March 2024.
Nevertheless, this is a significant drop of 32 per cent from the record high of 175,457 recorded in June 2023. Of those waiting, 76,268 have been on the waiting list for more than six months, although this number is down 46 per cent from last year’s record high of 139,961.
Home Secretary Yvette Cooper reiterated her commitment to tackling illegal migration, announcing plans to reopen two immigration centres as part of a wider strategy to increase the number of people being removed who have no legal right to remain in the UK.
Cooper, who has been criticised by migrant rights campaigners, said the Border Security Command would step up its activities.
She emphasised that 100 officers from the National Crime Agency had been brought in to reinforce the border. According to Cooper, they are to thwart “criminal gangs operating transport operations” and prevent migrants from travelling dangerously across the sea in boats. The minister also announced sanctions against negligent employers who hire migrants illegally.
For more than 10 years, each of Britain’s governments has promised to reduce the number of migrants. Britons who supported leaving the EU believed that the country’s immigration problems were due to EU pressure on it. But Brexit didn’t help: while net immigration in the year before the referendum in 2015 was 329,000, according to Reuters, it will be 745,000 in 2022, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Read more HERE
#world news#news#world politics#europe#european news#uk#uk politics#uk news#england#london#britain#united kingdom#migration#migrants#migración#immigration#immigrants
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