In the news

*Checks Jimmy was over 16 before Twitter was launched. As you were.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/cricket/57407788

"
It then said it was looking into reports a second England player posted historical "offensive material", before tweets by Eoin Morgan, James Anderson and Jos Buttler were highlighted.
"

Looking more and more like the ECB will only be retrospectively giving a shit about how players conduct themselves.

it'll come as no surprise to most of you, but the rich just aren't paying their fair share of tax

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/wealthiest-americans-income-tax-jeff-bezos-elon-musk-b939535.html

and as bezos is the richest of them all

if you want to do just one thing to get some small revenge - stop shopping at amazon, their record ( along with bezos's hedge fund mates and financiers ) of putting small rivals out of business with extremely dodgy financial practices is laid bare in many articles over the years

you could almost say shopping at amazon is economic terrorism, just use another website people, it's easy, it's not treking 6 miles across parched land to get the water you need to survive from a dirty pond, it's just a few extra mouse clicks from the comfort of your sofa, it's a quid or two extra on your bill*

*other ways of screwing the rich are available and it might be good if we got a list of them together

Macron getting slapped reminds me of that time Sarkozy got yanked into the crowd. Do the French GSPR have a different attitude to presidential security than the US Secret Service? Are Americans more afraid of getting shot/imprisoned?

My bigotry when I was young certainly did not come from my family. It came from private school and my failure, for whatever reason, to use my brain to challenge that shit.

You were a child. Go easy on yourself. In my experience the racist and sexist and sexist sterotypes and jokes that knocked around school weren't (I think) born of a particular hostility, although the effect was probably much the same, rather it was just a case of not really knowing a wide variety of people and not hearing about how these attitudes affected them.

French friend of mine reckons it was staged to try to claw back some popularity, because there's no way someone wouldn't have hit him harder than that, if they meant it! Stuff like this should probably go straight to the conspiracy thread though...

Is smacking some sort of insult ( a French thing ) ?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31764589

My bigotry when I was young certainly did not come from my family. It came from private school and my failure, for whatever reason, to use my brain to challenge that shit.

I guess the question is, at what age do we hold people accountable for their words and actions?

I went to state schools in SE London in the 70s and 80s and I heard some shit, and I was around some pretty repellent kids, but also some right darlings.
The worst racism I heard was from teachers at my ex grammar school (state comp) eg. You’re pretty clever for a n***** aren’t you XXX?
This from a maths teacher to my friend I’d been sitting with leaving a lesson.

I think this cricketer said some moderately daft stuff when he was pretty young, I wouldn’t cut him any slack for it but I also wouldn’t go looking for a fight over it. I absolutely agree that an apology should say something like ‘I said some racist and sexist things, I used to be a bit of an idiot when I was a kid’. The daft idea that there is some binary of racists and non-racists (or whichever prejudice you choose) needs to be addressed. We are all capable of othering, judging, condemning people based on some attribute we think they have that we don’t possess. Race, ability, sex, gender, sexuality- whatever.

The worst violence, misogyny and homophobia in my school was from the boys whose parents had come from the West Indies. In the early 80s these lads were definitely the dominant social and cultural group.

There were a few who made my life a misery, I ran into one in my early 20s - he was slightly incongruously (for those times) working behind the bar of the local punks/freaks/squatters/bikers pub, I cringed inwardly expecting the same old shit. ‘Hey man, I was a cunt at school, I’m sorry, what’re you drinking?’

I was chatting with a (black) friend in Deptford around that same time, talking about some guy I’d known at school who I referred to as half-caste, she was like ‘you shouldn’t call him that!!’
‘ but that’s what we all said, he would’ve called himself that’
...

People can change and sometimes they need a bit of persuasion, but we all have feet of clay.

Hive.co.uk is great for books.

Clothing wise, community clothing for UK made basics, people tree for your full made abroad ethical kit.

I've boycotted Amazon for ages but easy for me...I notice many animal charities use them due to their gift list feature. You can buy items for the charity.

Not to discount anyone's anecdotes, but this unnamed cricketer posted shit on Twitter when he was 16, so probably around 2006 - 2010, not the 80's.

Awareness of racism etc and the public calling out of it has increased a lot more in the past decade than in the preceding couple
IMO.

I guess people are trying to relate the cricketer being a teenage twat to their own experiences.

Could be. I wasn't aware of it + certainly missed the point, if it were!

You were a child. Go easy on yourself.

I mostly do. I hope that the people on the receiving end don't give a shit and have no issues with their childhood experiences in adulthood.

A few years back somebody I went to school with contacted me on Facebook and apologised for bullying me. I actually have no recollection of this guy being a dick to me at all but clearly something weighed on his mind that hasn't weighed on mine.

There are a couple of things I did when I was a kid that sometimes keep me awake at night. The thought has crossed my mind to contact those involved and front up about what I did and why but who is that serving, me or them? Best just to leave it in the past I think.

Everyone was a dickhead at some point in their past.
I was lucky that I did my dickhead years in the mid 90s and that shit wasn't recorded.

Not saying people shouldn't be held accountable for being a dickhead, but I certainly am not the same person I was in my teenage years.

(no excuse for hate though)

yeah I get it, I've for sure said some dumb shit when I was young but never from a place of actual malace and I'm glad it isn't on the internet to come back and haunt me.

My point is I think it's less excuseable to spout racist shit in 2008 than 1980 because it's less prevalent. Also Twitter only got popular around 2008 so whoever it was will have grown up on the internet so doubly should know better.

My point is I think it's less excuseable to spout racist shit in 2008 than 1980 because it's less prevalent.

I’d argue it’s the other way around.

Golly, what an unfortunate, entirely foreseeable set back for the PM of the UK.

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Move out of the way blacksmiths/metalbashers,
Chemistry is here to advance magnet technology:
https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/reaching-the-molecular-limit-of-magnetic-memory/4013778.article

advance magnet technology

How do they work? If the answer is magnets, I'll know you're trolling

I’d argue it’s the other way around.

I don't really want to kick it off again as I feel the debate has moved on, but I'm really curious to understand your rational.

Contrasting it with my experience at a state comp in the 80s -90s back when the progressive liberal agenda was widely accepted, political correctness was still considered to be a vehicle for social justice and all the teachers were card carrying lefties

Where did you go to school? Mine was a pit of casual racism.

'The magnetic hysteresis observed below 4K was attributed to the magnetic coupling of the unpaired d-electron spins on each of the transition metal ions and the large energy barrier to changing spin produced by the ligand environment.'
and
'Magnetic anisotropy describes whether a molecule has an intrinsically preferred direction for how spins line up in a magnetic field.'

tldr: a better description of a magnet

Yeah, so aliens then

I’d argue it’s the other way around.

I don't really want to kick it off again as I feel the debate has moved on, but I'm really curious to understand your rational.

Same, but IME overt racism is challenged more often, or accepted less encouragingly, now than it was previously. That has led to it becoming less prevalent in media, social dialogue, laws, etc.

Laser-equipped Aliens?