Cancellations
- Thread starter sufi
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sus
Moderator
Oh and he thinks we're existing in 500-year historical cycles. So e.g. Roman empire had a huge coinage system to fund its military and tax its empire, but that fell and was replaced in the Dark Ages by credit systems (as the Church consolidated the earlier coinage and no more was made). With the discovery of the Americas in 1492, coinage, standing armies, slave industries, and large government colonial operations like the Roman Empire return. This, in Graeber's eyes, defines the period we are currently coming out of, with Nixon in 1971 taking the US off the gold standard.
luka
Well-known member
Yeah they do
constant escape
winter withered, warm
@suspendedreason - Thanks, some good points there to think about. Hadn't considered debt in that light, connecting with sin and whatnot.
constant escape
winter withered, warm
Egging them on.
to me, it as at least as much a politics of class as it is a politics of race. as in, all the problems that might be ascribed to race are really about poverty.
I think you are talking years, generations of institutionalised poverty, poverty as a way of life, that cannot be compared to the same sort of poverty in London. I think cos the cities around that poverty (eg, let's say, Bradford) are really struggling, in a way that London is not. Also maybe the cheek by jowl nature of London, whereby you might have one rough street, one millionaires Street, next to one another, whereas up north, poor areas are often hidden away in their own little maze of cul de sacs and crescents, dead ends a long way off the main road.
i think the sense of isolation in some northern areas is really pronounced, compared to london. like public services for eg, municipal lesiure centres and the like, or public transport. london is so good for that, whereas some places up here, getting a bus to work can be a major issue.
Islamophobia is now at least 20 years embedded as well so this is a factor, especially cos up north, certain areas are not actually that multicultural, especially some of the very poor areas, they are like 50:50 white/asian. it becomes quite binary.
football... well, i do think it breaks down barriers but something happens i think, between primary/junior and secondary, where splits happen. and i think i would broadly agree with blockhead - it's not enough really. plus there's less footie embedded as a leisure activity, less places to play it. but sport is good at breaking down barriers as well, no doubt.
there has also been years of new labour social exclusion mess up here, same as everywhere else, blue sky thinkers drafted in to 'sort' community cohesion by forcing people to meet one another in false ways that people see through. very shallow, possibly well meaning but ultimately not real.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Jonathan Meades has some interesting things to say about the hollowness of New Labour's "regeneration" programmes, e.g. building shiny new civic facilities with a café offering six different kinds of coffee in the centres of run-down northern cities, while the people who live there are still faced with the choice of low-wage service-sector jobs or the old dole/petty crime/smack route.
This video's from 2007, at the height of this tendency just before the big crash, and is an interesting time capsule in itself, dating from barely half a generation ago, although it already seems like a lifetime. And it's only three years before all this was swept away by the still far worse Tory diet of endless, grinding austerity and even more hollow "big society" rhetoric.
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not seen it, might give it a whirl. what you've said sounds on point tho. i've been involved in these sorts of schemes from various perspectives over the years, it's always complex and the people are not necessarily total nasty fuckups, but the main issue to me seems to be around this idea that 'culture' is a 'problem' that can be fixed with some basic chat and a plaque or something.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
That's the thing, I'm sure much of it is well-meaning, just very shallow and based on the thinking that if you can banish the symptoms of social problems - litter and graffiti in a town centre, let's say - you banish the problems that give rise to those symptoms.
Of course, it's still preferable to an approach that isn't even well-meaning.
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luka
Well-known member
john eden
male pale and stale
It never ceases to amaze me that the far right are so obsessed with London being a hellhole with Sadiq overseeing stabbings all over the shop and Muslamic no go areas. London has its problems but it fundamentally works better in terms of integration than loads of other places.
Also that interviews is flippin great - "I grew up in a house with speakers as big as me, as a kid".
There's a cognitive dissonance at work around this stuff too. People will crack homophobic jokes in front of me because "I'm not like them." You might have a best pal from primary school of a different race who you kicked a ball with in childhood but that's not going to counter the bombardment of ideology about people who are... different