** The thread for Rants & Odds and Sods **

[mercalia]

A cambridge professor rants on about how slavery wasnt created by white people & how the cancel culture needs to be stopped

With the apparent approval of the chief librarian, Liz Jolly, a review of statues and artworks in the library is under way. Among those who are commemorated by statues in the library and who are being subjected to this inquisition are Beethoven and Mendelssohn, as protagonists of ‘western civilisational supremacy’......

According to the Daily Telegraph, Ms Jolly asserts that ‘racism is a creation of white people’, of whom she is one. In this she appears to be supported by the ‘Decolonising Working Group’ at the British Library, and by 200 members of the library staff, who are demanding special privileges for BAME staff, including a voice in the appointment of senior librarians within the BL, owing to the racial ‘state of emergency’ within its walls.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-racism-isn-t-a-creation-of-white-people-?

[ANTONISH]

A cambridge professor rants on about how slavery wasnt created by white people & how the cancel culture needs to be stopped



https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/no-racism-isn-t-a-creation-of-white-people-?

Call it a rant if you like - but it's true that white people didn't create slavery.

[mercalia]

The latest eps. in the Cancel Culture saga

David Hume has been Cancelled

University Edinburgh renames a tower commemorating David Hume the great C18 philosopher who together with John Locke and George Berkeley defined the agenda for Anglo-Saxon Philosophy until the present day, just because he recommended a friend buy a plantation.

David Hume was one of the great Scotish thinkers of the Enlightenment


The David Hume Tower will now be known as 40 George Square, the university confirmed, following pressure from activists, despite a petition amassing less than 2,000 signatures.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8730075/University-Edinburgh-fire-renaming-tower-commemorating-David-Hume.html

David Hume (1711-1776) is one of the most important UK philosophers, best known for his work on scepticism and empiricism and his contribution to the Enlightenment.

Hume saw philosophy as experimental science of human nature and tried to describe how the mind works in acquiring what is known as knowledge.

He had a profound and lasting impact on academics, his views said to have influenced the likes of economist Adam Smith, known as the Father of Capitalism, German philosopher Immanuel Kant and French sociologist Auguste Comte.

Hume also influenced the US following the American Revolution. James Madison defended the form of republican government proposed by the Constitution in the Federalist Papers, greatly influenced by Hume's work and drawing on his History of England.

He is also said to have influenced the French Revolution, having been hailed as the eighteenth-century British writer whose works were most widely known and acclaimed on the Continent during the later Enlightenment period before the overthrow of Louis XVI.

Hume's work is influential to this day, topping a 2010 survey of most admired philosophers and knocking Aristotle into second.

At the age of only 28 he released his groundbreaking philosophical work, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), an attempt to introduce scientific reasoning into moral subjects.

In it, Hume argued against the existence of innate ideas, and concluded that no theory of reality is possible.

[Jdsk]

University Edinburgh renames a tower commemorating David Hume the great C18 philosopher who together with John Locke and George Berkeley defined the agenda for Anglo-Saxon Philosophy until the present day, just because he recommended a friend buy a plantation.

Are you sure that's the only reason? What are your thoughts on "Of National Characters", please?

Thanks

Jonathan

[mercalia]

University Edinburgh renames a tower commemorating David Hume the great C18 philosopher who together with John Locke and George Berkeley defined the agenda for Anglo-Saxon Philosophy until the present day, just because he recommended a friend buy a plantation.

Are you sure that's the only reason? What are your thoughts on "Of National Characters", please?

Thanks

Jonathan

I knew you would be here, why I planted that I was just wondering how long.

Rather why dont you deal with the difficult topic of celebrating people from times past for their good points they personaly achieved rather than the bad that were typical of the time that were part of the intellectual milieu Tomiwa Owlade ( a black guy) provides us with a criterion how to answer that matter - how does the renaming make present black lives better?

[pwa]

University Edinburgh renames a tower commemorating David Hume the great C18 philosopher who together with John Locke and George Berkeley defined the agenda for Anglo-Saxon Philosophy until the present day, just because he recommended a friend buy a plantation.

Are you sure that's the only reason? What are your thoughts on "Of National Characters", please?

Thanks

Jonathan

I knew you would be here, why I planted that I was just wondering how long.

Rather why dont you deal with the difficult topic of celebrating people from times past for their good points they personaly achieved rather than the bad that were typical of the time that were part of the intellectual milieu Tomiwa Owlade ( a black guy) provides us with a criterion how to answer that matter - how does the renaming make present black lives better?

Each age gets to rename things and replace statues. It is traditional. Even the ancient Egyptians and the Romans did it. Why should we break with that tradition?

[Jdsk]

Rather why dont you deal with the difficult topic of celebrating people from times past for their good points they personaly achieved rather than the bad that were typical of the time that were part of the intellectual milieu Tomiwa Owlade ( a black guy) provides us with a criterion how to answer that matter - how does the renaming make present black lives better?

Is that addressed to me?

Hume was a wonderful thinker and writer. He still has lots to tell us, including how we might choose to think about issues such as mandatory wearing of cycle helmets. I reread some of his works frequently. I use his insights when I'm teaching.

But you asserted that concerns over the naming of a tower block were only about his advice to a friend on a plantation. That simply isn't true. My guess is that you didn't check in the rush to outrage.

The University has very sensibly taken a holding position while they consider it further. I think that they'll probably make a good decision.

Jonathan

[mercalia]

<SNIP>

regarding the Egyptians I think the Pharoes used to scrub out the successes of previous ones and repurpose others to denote their glory Hardly a good example for today? I think Akhenaten was scrubbed completley becuase he was one of the first monotheists and the establishment after his death decided to cancel him.

[andrewwillans49]

Just watched a pretty depressing programme presented by Sir David Attenborough. It was about mass extinction caused almost entirely by human activity. The planet is overpopulated and many want too much materially. Bigger houses, bigger SUVs, overseas travel etc.
I have six children and am aware of the impact that will have on he earths resources. I'm in no place to lecture or judge others.
Its only in the last two decades that I've became aware of global warming, and the impact of too many people on the planet. We don't go abroad for holidays, flown once in my life, resist buying green beans from Paraguay etc, so we're attempting to mitigate our 1980s breeding programme.
Many people I speak to are also concerned about the planet, and I believe they are genuinely concerned, but most are wealthy, middle class people whom have huge houses, huge German cars, fly away skiing and in summer fly away to warmer countries. I have no answers.
I just hope "we" see the error of our ways in time to avert disaster, otherwise I suspect what my children and grandchildren will face will make the Covid 19 situation look like a storm in a teacup.

[mercalia]

Just watched a pretty depressing programme presented by Sir David Attenborough. <SNIP>

+1. Its the "haves" that worry, the "have nots" dont have the time or leisure

[Graham]

+1. Its the "haves" that worry, the "have nots" dont have the time or leisure

When our(*) very existence depends upon it - I would suggest that everybody has the time to reorganise their lives.

* our - well future generations actually. . . . . by (us) continuing to live the fossil-fuelled dream we are imposing a nightmare upon our children, grandchildren and onwards ( if we get that far ).

We are intelligent & adaptable. We can stop this . . . . . Er, or are we / can we ??

[mercalia]

A rather long but interesting article about the piligrims and other european migrants to North America


The myth of the ‘stolen country’: What should the Europeans have done with the New World

Last month, in the middle of the Covid panic, a group of first-year university students at the University of Connecticut were welcomed to their campus via a series of online ‘events’. At one event, students were directed to download an app for their phones. The app allowed students to input their home address, and it would piously inform them from which group of Native Americans their home had been ‘stolen’.

A rebuttal by Jeff Fynn-Paul is associate professor in history at Leiden University

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-myth-of-the-stolen-country

[mercalia]

Beeching finaly wins

'Bittersweet' farewell for Scotland's oldest miniature railway

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-54250044

[Oldjohnw]

A mere month ago the government was giving away billions to persuade us to go to pubs and restaurants. Now they are closing down these same places to stop this virus, which they appear to have only just heard of.

[reohn2]

A mere month ago the government was giving away billions to persuade us to go to pubs and restaurants. Now they are closing down these same places to stop this virus, which they appear to have only just heard of.

And nine months ago when some countries were stopping international air travel along with effective testing and tracing implementing face mask wearing in public,isolating anyone who showed C19 symptoms.
All of which led to low infection rates and low death rates in countries such as NZ,SK,Vietnam,etc,etc

Whilst our government as far back as 2016 ignored all WHO warnings of a Covid pandemic and burying the Gygnus report,running down PPE and ventilator stocks into the bargain.
In February were claiming there was no threat to the UK,even though Italy and Spain were seeing rapid wildfire increases in C19 cases,with plane loads of people entering the country from those countries and even China,people who were simply allowed to walk out of the airport without any check whatsoever,that state of affairs persists even today nine months later.
As a result of the govt's total and continued incompetence and stupidity we are now up the proverbial creek without a paddle,again with a patchy at best track and trace system,an increasingly frustrated population,and continually confusing,to say the least,govt initiatives and directives,with the NHS once again coming under ever increasing stress once again.

Anyway we get the politicians we deserve,so thanks to all you Tory voters out there who thought after ten years of Tory incomeptence,BoJo was a safe pair of hands and not just a circus clown on the world stage,I hope you're all happy when the country is left,once again,on it's raggedy arris by a bunch of incompetent public schoolboys.

And I didn't even mention Brexit....... ......oops just did ......