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Open letter denouncing the "restriction of debate".

For me it means ‘safe’ and ‘secure’. If you’ve ever been neither of those things they really do carry some weight.

Well, yes, I've been in the position both of living on the dole with literally no other resources, and of trying to fund a large mortgage on a single income when our children were small and Mrs H wasn't working, at a time when the mortgage rate seem to increase daily. The latter was far worse, as I had three people depending on me. I quite enjoyed the former, as I could quite happy manage on very little, and everybody I knew was more or less in the same boat.
 
on the other hand, they also seem to want to make a meal of things which have been largely addressed/redressed by previous generations in the realm of civil rights.

WTF? Seriously? Police are still stamping black people to death and shooting them in the back. Right now. In 2020. It is open-season on LGBT folk in many cultures too (especially your beloved former Soviet Union) with trans folk routinely beaten, maimed or murdered without even the slightest attempt at investigation or justice from the state (assuming it wasn’t directly involved). You live in such a bubble of privilege it is extraordinary.
 
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Post deleted. Please don’t just fly-tip YouTube crap onto the site. If you can’t be bothered to articulate your own arguments don’t bother posting. Most of us just don’t have the time to spend hours watching some random videos shovelled up without explanation or reason.
 
i posted a very good 3-part documentary on the evergreen state affair. your reaction is to label it youtube crap. think about that. read the title of the thread.

people post videos all time time that are self-explanatory. i'm also not one who shies away from articulating my positions. if you're not familiar with the evergreen matter, you really shouldn't be writing anything on this topic. it's the poster child for everything wrong with cancel culture and the documentary clearly shows a student mob that has blown things completely out of proportion, often in contradictory, orwellian ways.

i had read about the "incident" (it's more than an incident) and did not realize just how crazy it all was until i saw the documentary, because it's almost impossible to believe much of what happened without seeing it on video.
 
I am not sure the causes that interest the youth have changed that much. When you are young, you think you know better & try to change things. It doesn’t always work but over time it does alter what is socially acceptable.
 
FWIW There is a very good article about the Evergreen protests etc here in the Huff Post that doesn’t take the all too predictable frothing alt-right ‘cancel culture’ line.
 
Well, quite. I'm relatively wealthy in that I've paid off my mortgage, and so all the equity in my house belongs to my wife and me.
I don't think a rating based on income is "useless".

How one chooses to spend it is entirely another matter and the less you have to start with, the fewer options you have. To have a mortgage one must be relatively wealthy in the first place.
 
FWIW There is a very good article about the Evergreen protests etc here in the Huff Post that doesn’t take the all too predictable frothing alt-right ‘cancel culture’ line.

so you went out and found a rare article to match what you want to believe, rather than look at the evidence first hand?

i am familiar with that article. it's narrow in focus and fails completely to portray how irrational and intolerant the "activists" were. it's also mainly about reactions in the media to the central incident, not everything that led up to it or the immediate local aftermath.

instead, you can watch video recording of what happened: not just the little standoff with bret weinstein, but actual meetings, confrontations, protest speeches, lectures, etc.
 
I don't think a rating based on income is "useless".

How one chooses to spend it is entirely another matter and the less you have to start with, the fewer options you have. To have a mortgage one must be relatively wealthy in the first place.

Of course it is useless as it doesn’t factor either wealth or expenditure! As an example I come out in the bottom 39% based on the two questions asked as my actual income is quite low, but I bet I’d be in a very different category if it factored I own my home outright, have no debts at all, have a good solid business, lots of sellable assets and decent savings. Basically my income over expenditure is pretty good, not appreciably worse than it was when I was a well paid IT guy with lots of outgoings (large London rent, Tube etc). I don’t need much coming in as I have so little going out.

The site just doesn’t make any sense. How would it rank some landed gentry with a hobby business selling garden plants from their huge mansion? Probably well below a postman as their “wage” is far lower. Millions of people in the UK apparently have less than £100 in savings (BBC)! That is just terrifying, no safety buffer at all. If they lose their job they are screwed. I’d not be able to sleep at night. I certainly don’t want to say here what I’ve got squirrelled away, but enough to live on for a few years if I had to, and I’m sure most folk here are just the same. Any calculator needs to factor this sort of thing in as it really is relevant.

PS I’ve just redone it as though I was still an IT consultant/contractor in That London as I was in the ‘90s (adjusted for inflation) and I’m off the map! The bizarre thing is I didn’t have that much more free money then than I have now as my outgoings were just so high. It’s all a basic input/output thing, and any assessment needs to factor that.
 
alt-right ‘cancel culture’
You might not like the term 'cancel culture', that's OK, but why should it be something typically alt-right ? A few pages earlier in this thread you mention that 'cancel culture' had always been there. In that, I agree, but then this instrument has certainly been used/misused by all sorts of political orientations. Currently in social media (and here) it is mainly used by the left.
 
are you joking? it's used against me here all the time, typically by centrists, and i am the most left person on the forum (or just behind claire).

Economically (theoretical not practical) maybe. In all other respects you are likely the most conservative.
 
are you joking? it's used against me here all the time, typically by centrists, and i am the most left person on the forum (or just behind claire).
I think jez and Clare vie for silver and gold, you get a highly creditable bronze.
 
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PS I’ve just redone it as though I was still an IT consultant/contractor in That London as I was in the ‘90s (adjusted for inflation) and I’m off the map! The bizarre thing is I didn’t have that much more free money then than I have now as my outgoings were just so high. It’s all a basic input/output thing, and any assessment needs to factor that.

Yep. My income is about half what it was when working, but taking out mortgage payments and commuting costs means I'm no worse off in real terms. And if it wasn't mortgage payments, it'd be rent, which these days would probably be higher.
 
You know you are really strange, right?

I am not in the vanilla business. I am in the radar business.

You and Vuk should form a group, The x-band perhaps?, to reflect upon the group disparity and reduce its propensity to scatter.
 
@droodzilla , @matthewr

this is NOT about free speech, it's about something far more basic. in terms of the current student (or student-age) generation, i think it's fantastic that so many have been able to break through massive ideological dogma to question capitalism, criticize israel, demand climate change action and denounce imperialist wars. on the other hand, they also seem to want to make a meal of things which have been largely addressed/redressed by previous generations in the realm of civil rights. as it happens, it always seems to be in the latter domain that a relatively trivial difference of opinion or a vague remark leads to all out war and wholesale dismissal of people. hey, if it just stayed on twitter, it would be one thing, but when people are losing their jobs, that's quite another. are you familiar with the mob incident(s) at evergreen state? you may want to watch the video of all that.

Sorry but that is an incredibly crass statement. Racism in the USA has festered for decades but it's never gone away and the white supremacists have never been more emboldened in recent times. This matters because it's the context within which seemingly minor ideological differences can blow up. Perhaps they are not as minor as they might appear to people who don't know the history of racism and its manifestations in the present.

I recently witnessed, first-hand, a related development on a forum I use professionally. A couple of ethnic minority members of staff pointed out that the organsation's ethnic mix significantly diverges from the wider population's, and asked how this might be addressed in light of recent interest in BLM. There was no aggression or implied criticism of anyone on the forum, but it was met with a wall of defensiveness, missing the point, nit-picking, obfuscation, changing the subject and expressions of hurt feeling from the overwhelmingly white, middle class members of the forum. Weeks later several related threads rumble on, but the original posters are nowhere to be seen - I can only assume they have given up in despair. I won't name the organisation but if I did, you would expect it to be full of liberal-left types. And it is, but my point is that, even in this relatively rarefied atmosphere of liberal tolerance, a huge number of people have a big blind spot when it comes to acknowledging the concerns of ethnic minorities.

Another anecdote, which brought home to me the reality of black life here in the UK. A young man of mixed-race, who I've met several times (he's the nephew of my partner's best friend) has been stopped and searched by police five times in the last couple of years. I know this guy: he lives in a perfectly respectable part of London, he's painfully shy and wouldn't say boo to a goose, and he is slightly built. What must it do to someone to know they are constantly being viewed with suspicion by people who can make life difficult for them (and worse) with the full backing of the state?

I found the Evergreen State College videos. It looks like an interesting, well made documentary, and I think Tony was wrong to censor you (Irony's kinda ironic that way). I intend to watch it in full (unless I get bored) but, whatever the rights and wrongs of the case, within the opening minutes of the documentary, it is stated that Evergreen State is the most progressive of all the progressive colleges. As such, I doubt we can draw general lessons from the exeperience and make the leap to a full-blown "free speech crisis".

Like I said before, the relentless focus on a few extreme examples (if that applies to Evergreen State) is the currency of the far-right and it's designed to undermine legitimate demands for change. And it completely inverts the reality in which the majority of people who are silenced or experience abuse are from minority groups - ask the black people who no longer seem to be posting on the forum I mentioned.

PS: I see whether people should lose their jobs over some of this stuff as mostly a separate issue - it's why we need good employment law, decent employment practices and strong representation in the form of unions.
 
Of course it is useless as it doesn’t factor either wealth or expenditure! As an example I come out in the bottom 39% based on the two questions asked as my actual income is quite low, but I bet I’d be in a very different category if it factored I own my home outright, have no debts at all, have a good solid business, lots of sellable assets and decent savings. Basically my income over expenditure is pretty good, not appreciably worse than it was when I was a well paid IT guy with lots of outgoings (large London rent, Tube etc). I don’t need much coming in as I have so little going out....
So income is no determiner of wealth at all, ever? Really. Tell that to the guy on a zero hours contract or a family on universal credit and see how much they agree with a home owning, no debt, business owner with assets.
 
So income is no determiner of wealth at all, ever? Really. Tell that to the guy on a zero hours contract or a family on universal credit and see how much they agree with a home owning, no debt, business owner with assets.

Do you honestly think the two questions on the site define the situation? Is my situation really exactly the same as say a typical worker at Asda (who likely makes a fairly similar income), has to pay £500 a month in rent, has <£100 in savings and has crippling credit-card debt to pay off each month? You are the one with blinkers here, I am aware things are rather more nuanced. For clarity: I am saying income is but one indicator of wealth. There are many others that were not asked. How much one has in savings being a huge one along with a person’s monthly outgoings on rent/mortgage. Without even the most basic data set the site is useless.
 


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