Good article. We need to go further and remind all we live in a democracy and free speech is a fundamental right even if this can offend. Even the SNP cannot be this stupid as to try and enact this piece of legislation.

Great article. Whatever happened to tolerance? My other ( better?) half and I would have been divorced years ago with out it.

When you pull a thread, doesn’t the garment unravel?

Good article. Let’s hope Patel can get on and resolve this problem of illegal immigrants.

My understanding is that anthropologists do not accept that ‘races’ exist at all. If they do, where are the genetic or geographical boundaries between them? Countries and cultures exist because they tend to self-reinforce by manufacturing identities and boundaries, for good practical reasons. Pigmentation of skin is real, but ‘colour’ is in the eye of the beholder. It puzzles me that the politically-correct are so quick to label people like President Obama, Meghan Markle and Senator Harris as ‘black’ as soon as they show the slightest hint of pigmentation, or admit to having any ancestry other than Northern European. (One must exclude swarthy Mediterranean types so beloved of early photographers of the primal and artless). Are these anti-racists and discrimination-haters saying that only pure Aryans can call themselves ‘white’? After a few months in supposedly dull and rainswept southern England, thanks partly to coronavirus preventing me from travelling far, I probably have darker skin than either of the two ladies mentioned. I must have at least two ancestors who came out of Africa. So what is it really about? History? But that’s a bit theoretical as the past is another country that busy people have time to visit only occasionally. Culture? I probably have more in common with those three ‘black’ people than with most of my fellow countrymen. At base, it’s probably about not having enough of something to go around, which is ‘situation normal’ because every organism will push itself to a state of subsistence given the chance. When that happens, groups form and separate because it’s more stable. So racial categories are reactionary, but I suspect not to ‘race’.

From the picture it looks like the chickens are out scratching about in the garden. What do you do about foxes?

Social media seems very good at amplifying the worst aspects of human nature, aspects that our forebears created a whole system called “manners” to control. The adage “sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” seems to have been forgotten.

“For me, it feels like the grammar equivalent of All Lives Matter.”

And that about sums up the substance of the woke racial justice thesis””it feels like…”

Lived experience, anecdotes, statistical anomalies, feelings, and emotions are all the driving force behind the BLM movement at large, as opposed to measured analysis, facts, and dispassionate conversation.

Emotions can be easily manipulated by a press apparatus that makes a decision to collectively focus their [our] gaze upon a particularly heinous event, and offer absolutely no nuance or statistical context to its actual rarity.

The result is a mass of people who feel like a black person is “literally being hunted” [““Lebron James], or a black friend of mine speaking irrationally about when he goes out for a run in an LA suburb, he feels like he’s going to be shaken down by a racist cop, despite easily accessible policing statistics in that suburb showing nothing of the sort.

As Sam Harris put it in his 207th episode, “If you care about justice”and you absolutely should”then you should care about facts.”

Of the many stats given in that episode, here are few:

There are about 50″“60 million encounters with cops each year.

Of those 50″“60M, there are about 10 million arrests (down from a 14 million high in the 90s), and of those 10 million, ~1000 people are killed by cops each year. So 1 in 10,000 arrests end in a police killing. Of these 1000 deaths, some, if not most are entirely justified, some aren’t, and some are hard to judge.

Of this 1000, about 50% are white. About 25% are black. Of this 1000, last year about 50 were unarmed. Just over 10 of those were black.

“Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that I or anyone else need to respect. Your capacity to be offended isn’t something that you should respect. In fact it’s something that you should be on your guard for. Perhaps more than any other property of your mind, this feeling can mislead you.” ““Sam Harris

Three decades of promoting multi-culturalism has instead resulted in a multiplicity of mono-cultures. How can the alleged benefits of diversity be obtained when a white person enjoying a curry is cultural appropriation. God help the Lancastrian who likes Yorkshire pudding.

Do you let them in amongst your veg? I don’t let my hens into the veg patch – they love brassica leaves, beans, courgettes, lettuce as much as we do. Instead, I go around the garden hunting slugs and snails for them (which they love).

One of the wonderful things about keeping hens is that the food waste going out to the bin men or even the compost heap is reduced to almost nil.

‘their high coronavirus death rates, among the worst in the world’

Really?

https://www.worldometers.in…