Westminstenders: Blue Passports

[RedToothBrush]

Yay for the blue passports.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all

May next year bring us £350 million for the NHS, cake, unicorns, financial passporting, access to the single market, Irish love and of course control to the people.

(Apologies been up to my eyeballs. Normal service will resume after Christmas).

I actually support the IDEA , let people say what they believe , I have no issue with the likes of Male coming on this thread , they come on , say their bit , express their opinion . That is how it should be , we can offer counter arguments , ask for evidence when they state something as fact . Some of my firmest held beliefs are held as a result of people who hold diametrically opposite beliefs testing theirs against mine IYSWIM . Critical thinking is essential as Male was keen to point out .

The gravy I made on Christmas Eve pesky Danish tradition didn't use cornflour: it was just the meat juices (as it happens, a turkey which had been roasted on top of a "trivet" of onions and oranges) mixed with 25g of flour (mushing the oranges and onions) and whisked for a minute or two, then 100ml of white wine added gradually and whisked for another couple of minutes and then 400ml of water and whisked/bubbled through for a few more minutes.

That would work with a lamb cube sprinkled into the roasting tray.

FWIW: 100% Scottish dh is also 100% Remain - although he may have been tainted with illegal immigrant blood as he has black eyes and olive skin so we think that there is a shipwrecked Spaniard from the fleeing Armada somewhere in his ancestry. My 81 year old father is also strongly Remain.

My friends, family and I believe in Remain because we've thought about it and are quite happy to have reasoned, intelligent arguments with alternative viewpoints - but so far, have really struggled to have any considered arguments that can't be easily refuted back again. Absolutely nowt to do with the gender of those arguing. Although, it does illustrate the paucity of the "arguments" of the interloper(s) if they try to claim that the demolition of their arguments (or even asking to see any real, demonstrable facts ) is discriminatory

Many of the 'no platformers' have been illiterate chauvinistic men with inferiority complexes, shutting down speeches by eminent feminists.

I can't imagine how annoying that might be.

I think this is peculiar to US, totalitarian regimes and britain?

The deliberately polarised tenor of political discourse in many circles apart from the esteemed current thread, mitigates agains intelligent debate, about many issues which are too important not to discuss.

When I hear the word 'iconic', I reach for my revolver dictionary keyboard.

I dislike the overuse of 'iconic' to mean 'symbolic but can't be arsed to explain what the symbol is of', or in fact 'symbolic mainly of being too underfunded to do anything other than Google and rewrite press releases, so end up talking about any old shit that I'm sent'. Or even 'symbolic of something I don't actually want to talk about'. Surely the British passport in its day was symbolic mainly of Empire, though perhaps also of the rule of law.

I find it slightly odd that govt would be telling universities who should and shouldn't speak. Aren't universities meant to be able to exercise their own discretion?

From 1988-1994, successive Tory governments did an extreme form of no-platforming Sinn Fein

I think there is a reasonable argument to be had about the extent to which it is reasonable to limit the free speech of terrorists and their political enablers, or at least to limit their access to the media.

The Tory hypocrisy in this case is more to do with the unequal treatment of the political wings of Northern Irish terrorist organisations.

Woman didn't Germaine Greer get cancelled ? forgive me if I am wrong , but I thought she identified as a feminist ?

The problem with banning SinnFein, Misti is that they were, even then, a major NI political party,
with large support in the Nationalist community

It made the govt look total idiots - yet again.
And further increased Nationlist grievance and SinnFein voter support

imo, it would be morally ok to ban speakers who represent only terrorists, who have only a tiny % of public support.
It is quite wrong to ban a major political party that doesn't openly do this

SinnFein were / are the political wing of a nationalist guerrilla movement, rather than nihilistic terrorists with whom we can't negotiate.

Anyone who advocates violence should be charged with incitement, whether their threats are verbal or carried on posters

(I mean genuinely advocates, not a stupid immature joke about strangling or punching someone as, iirc, a stupid Tory MP did)

Sinn Fein have been official elected members of Belfast Agreement NI gov for well over 10 years.
When was the last time Michelle O Neill or any SF representative got a long interview on the BBC?
Or any interview?

frumpety don't want to disrupt the thread but Germaine Greer, Magdelen Berns and Julie Bindel; all eminent thinkers and academics have been shut down from speaking on university campuses.
Other threads have more on this.

Yes, I though she was labelled a TERF and no-platformed

Sorry, x-post!

Just because , I am sure their will be a few on here who remember it ...

It made the govt look total idiots - yet again.
It's funny really to compare the tories' handbag dropping at SF and the ANC.
In the 1980s they were both accused of being terrorists.
Stroll on 30 odd years, both in power, both presided over relatively peaceful transitions.
It was too embarrassing for tories to admit what they had said about Nelson Mandela when he came here as an international hero.

And SF are still not accepted as legitimate reps.
Unsurprising that they don't take their seats in HOC.

And what a game changer it would be for all of us, if they did.

Free speech/hate speech debate also happening in America. Incidentally, is “white nationalists” a whitewashedeuphemistic term for Nazis?

Universities fear a violent 2018
White nationalists plan more campus rallies, and anti-fascist extremists are ready to push back.

www.politico.com/story/2017/12/26/white-nationalists-antifa-university-violence-305014

Re no platforming - if you disagree with an idea, then you should debate it, present arguments, facts, (I know I am talking to the converted here). If you can't even talk about an idea how can you present arguments against/for it? Yes have protest marches for/against ideas. But at a university you should be able to listen to the debate. ask questions, promote counter-arguments etc. Else we end up with the situation where any one who disagrees with you is a traitor and/or a saboteur. And who decides who should be banned, and what if you disagree with them ... Going back to Voltaire 'I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it'.

frumpety iirc, Germaine Greer dared to talk about biology

• men can become transwomen, but not women

Hence, she is classed as a TERF - as I would be < and proud of it >

TERFs support the rights of transwomen not to be discriminated against as transwomen
but oppose treating biological males as women in areas where sex is a factor, e.g. competitive sport, toilets, changing rooms, prisons, womens' refuges and rape centres
because that removes safe spaces & hard-won rights from women.

Transwomen have violently attacked women attending some feminist meetings and have caused injuries to young & old.
That's a different matter, because criminal law of assault has been broken

I am concerned about govt forcing universities or broadcasting media to give platforms to people they don't choose to.
Or e.g. should the Tory Party conference be forced to invite Sinn Fein speakers to their fringe meetings ?
Both sides might learn a lot, but it shouldn't be compulsory

However, if an organisation or group has chosen to invite speakers, then those speakers should be allowed to speak and counter-demonstrations could also be allowed.
If necessary, the police must enforce the peace

Talk of No-Platforming and the ridiculous ban on Sinn Fein (which iirc, the BBC got round by having actors saying the exact same words that Martin McGuiness or Gerry Adams had said ) reminds me of "banning" in the worst years of apartheid, when the government thought it could control the spread of dangerous unconscionable ideas by not just allowing certain people to be quoted, but they weren't even allowed to meet other people.

woman11017 irony feminists who have fallen out of favour with the SU like Germaine Greer have been non-platformed. The trouble with non-platform is it provides a framework to potentially exclude a whole spectrum of voices that have fallen out of favour or do not fit in with the dominant political ideology of the institution. If you don't protect others freedoms you potentially build the frame work to one day remove your own.

As I recall, the Beeb (and others) replaced the hideously harsh accents of Gerry Adams et al, with much more mellifluous Irish accents, making them sound considerably less militant and horrible!

Back in the day there was a lot of talk of no platforming to

1. prevent spread of fascist ideas ala BNP/Nick Griffin
2. prevent Muslim radicalisation at universities which was a bit of a problem. Unfortunately over time it's been hijacked to primarily be aimed at feminists saying things men don't like rather than people actually purveying hate speech. I think no platforming does have it's place with respect to hate speech and I really wish our media and press treated Nigel Farage the same way they treated Nick Griffin. But no platforming people like Germaine Greer, Julie Bindel, Peter Tatchell and Kate Smurthwaite is just ridiculous.

The question is whether an institution is allowed to ban something on its own property
In many cases, it might well be better that they allowed debate; in other cases, not.
BUT
I don't trust this, or any future government, to impose such decisions on universities and the media.

However, what must be enforced, is that when a speaker has been invited, that they are allowed to do so in safety.
Of course if they break the law wrt incitement to violence, or hate speech, then they should get prosecuted like anyone else.

I attended debates in the 1970s at the Student Union, in which holocaust-deniers and the Paedophile Information Exchange spoke

• to be blunt, they were far too sophisticated for the teenage students we were and they used similar tactics to populists now, railing against the elite.

On reflection, they were scum who spread a lot of poison

Re no platforming - if you disagree with an idea, then you should debate it, present arguments, facts, (I know I am talking to the converted here). If you can't even talk about an idea how can you present arguments against/for it? Yes have protest marches for/against ideas. But at a university you should be able to listen to the debate. ask questions, promote counter-arguments etc

I don't fundamentally disagree with this, but in reality it is too often used to create a false equivalence between scientific discourse and politically-inspired opinion, eg on subjects like climate change.

You don't "debate" academic subjects in the same way that you argue about political ideas. The debate happens in peer-reviewed articles, where ideas can be explored in depth and the detailed evidence presented, and not on a stage, where too often presentation wins out over content. You can have debate in the conventional sense, but only if you ensure that participants have similar levels of expertise and are prepared to debate in good faith on issues where there is genuine room for disagreement (so to take the climate change example, it makes no sense to debate whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas - that's like debating whether gravity is real - but it would be possible to debate climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2).

Bigchoc I'm not saying it was right to shut down media coverage of Sinn Fein. But you can have a rational debate about how governments should deal with the "free speech" rights of terrorist organisations and their "political wings" - at what point does participation in or enabling of criminal acts justify limitations being placed on freedom of speech? But what you can't do (without being accused of hypocrisy) is to shut down only one side, when both sides are guilty of using violence to further political objectives.

Good news on the GRA and the successful feminists' campaign for maintaining women only spaces. , is that Greening is getting cold feet and has paused changes to GRA.

So well done us.

Hopefully women will be consulted on the next steps with this, and not just trans activists. (who shut down the speakers at universities etc)

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/b3fe92ae-e81c-11e7-a174-4895c8d54551

misti and bigchoc are you aware of 'non platforming' happening in Germany and France?