Racism

luka

Well-known member
I don't think there's anything that worries me more than the way the Internet, particularly YouTube and Twitter, have normalised racism. This is something I find massively distressing. How should we solve it?

It's not like we ever eradicated it but there's no doubt we've regressed massively.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I dunno but your line ‘how can we solve it’ feels like a dead end. I dont think its the sort of thing that can be solved like. Its a different order of issue.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I think several things are happening at once in this country.

Many many people now have non-white friends, partners, colleagues and neighbours that they get on with and their ethnicity is largely not even discussed.

At the same time social atomisation and financial impoverishment has meant that people who are racist are emboldened. And politicians and the media have largely not resisted it. I think these people rely on the British docility and politeness to spout their poison.

It’s a significant vector in the culture war that’s playing out.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I agree with most of this, only thing I would question is the first bit about many people having positive multicultural lives. I don't think it's that simple and there's a lot of levels there.

I think, broadly, I take the line that the politics of race is really the politics of class ie racism becomes an issue when poverty is an issue. The two are very wrapped up together. Most of the serious writers on it engage with this idea at least.

Language is an issue, labels and so on.
 

Leo

Well-known member
And politicians and the media have largely not resisted it.

even worse, some pols and media have fanned the flames and exploited it. think Fox News opinion shows, breitbart, rush Limbaugh. and of course, trump.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I agree with most of this, only thing I would question is the first bit about many people having positive multicultural lives. I don't think it's that simple and there's a lot of levels there.

I think, broadly, I take the line that the politics of race is really the politics of class ie racism becomes an issue when poverty is an issue. The two are very wrapped up together. Most of the serious writers on it engage with this idea at least.

Language is an issue, labels and so on.

I also agree with this. I would add though, that last time I looked at the statistics, in London at least the levels of integration are far higher the lower you get down the socio-economic scale. You can see this embodied in kids who are of mixed heritage or whatever the correct term is.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah London is a different country to the rest of the country tho. Parts of London are fucked but for the most part it's a beacon of multiculturalism I would say
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
I think what's happened is we've seen racism go from taboo ("you can't say that!") to taboo-breaker ("just speaking a few honest home truths that the cowardly liberal establishment etc etc." ). I think this is why it's hard to fight - because previous standards rested on unspoken taboos.

To state the obvious, this goes alongside those in power realising (or remembering maybe) how much they can weaponise and exploit grievance and resentment on racial grounds. It's got common currency because it's a resource that can be used, no other reason.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i was thinking only yesterday that having grown up in the golden age of neoliberalism in london i lived through a very narrow temporal and geographic window where racial humour wasn't particularly "problematic" (to use the parlance).

in secondary school racial humour was non-stop. it was the social lubricant. african kids and jamaican kids taking the piss of each others ethnicities. muslim. chinese. a somali girl once said to me that i go cycling in sandals which i remember made me howl. it was a good thing insofar as any differences between us where simultaneously out in the open, but also made to be ok. it meant that you wouldn't have some evangelical african in conflict with some bengali girl nor would they be socially segregated. it meant we could all get along.

but with the rise of white idenity politics and nativism i imagine if i was at school now there'd be a lot more suspicion about it. there wouldn't be the underlying trust that it was all said in jest.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I don't think there's anything that worries me more than the way the Internet, particularly YouTube and Twitter, have normalised racism. This is something I find massively distressing. How should we solve it?

It's not like we ever eradicated it but there's no doubt we've regressed massively.

Makes me think of that time a few years ago when some programmers released this super-advanced chatbot that was meant to be indistinguishable from a real human but it was taken down almost straight away because it had been trained on social media so it just spewed out bigoted slurs and insults because that's what's on social media.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
The Tai chatbot was deliberately subverted by channers who just fed it a constant stream of filth to turn it evil.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
It's funny how this has become over time a story about the evilness of the whole internet, when it was actually targeted subversion...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
It's funny how this has become over time a story about the evilness of the whole internet, when it was actually targeted subversion...

Interesting. I mean it's still a crappy thing to do but what else would you expect from 4chan? I guess it is certainly a lot different from a chatbot being turned Nazi by exposure to the internet in general.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Someone connected to Trump was on Newsnight last night saying that he was "doing everything he could" about the corona virus which equated to "increasing security at the borders". Nothing else.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
I don't quite understand how a self-confessed germaphobe can be so blasé about a potential pandemic.

Well he didn't know that flu killed people until a few days ago, so he is on a learning curve I guess.

Stop the foreigners and ask drug companies to make a vaccine, seems to be the strategy.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
:crylarf:

He can't even do being a germaphobe properly.

It's an irrational phobia. I've read murky accounts about him making women wear gloves to give him a handjob but then fucking them bareback, that sort of thing.
 

sufi

lala
At our local nick they've "started an investigation" into how come someone did Nazi graffiti in part of the station that only cops can access https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news...ea-of-police-station-accessible-only-to-staff
The police watchdog, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC), said it had not been informed of the incident nor made aware of Scotland Yard’s investigation into it.
 
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