The Fifty Seventh Republic - the joy of bank holiday marking

[StaffRepFeistyClub]

You are most welcome to this school staff support thread to get us through stressful times. It is meant for school staff only – a sort of room of requirement. Baiters, haters, goaders, and bashers can jog on somewhere else.

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I found that 'maths is racist' thing uncomfortable on Twitter because it didn't need brining up by a white middle aged non maths(?) teacher for derision and mockery when it isn't even relevant to, or part of , our educational contexts

Andrew's a maths teacher. And tbf (and I'm not defending him being an arse, he's awful, but they're all being arses, both sides), he'd just had a kicking accusing him of racism from a British white maths educator who I think I've seen 'maths is racist' type stuff from.

The maths is racist stuff is, as far as I can tell, part of Antiracist thought. If you've got an Antiracist hashtag next to your name and you're shouting at British educators who haven't and accusing them of racism for not saying that they're Antiracist, I think it's probably reasonable to point out that Antiracism isn't simply saying 'racism is bad and should be dealt with', but comes with stuff like 'maths is racist and we need to do more group work to combat it'.

I agree that importing US ideas into UK contexts isn't appropriate.

I disagree, Piggy. Even the DM now runs articles arguing for women's rights/spaces/sports to be upheld. Older relatives have used this issue in conversation about why they can't vote Labour.

Example on my fb literally this morning: a social worker friend going on about voting Tory being the equivalent of wanting to round up Jews and black people and kill them.

I honestly don't hear the women's rights thing round here : the DM does like to inflame it.

I think my views on trans rights are probably not the same as yours, so will leave that one there!

My FB feed is highly curated : not many friends. Quite a few are American but the only very outspoken political views I have ever read are for my Trumpist BIL. And an Irish friend who now hardly posts.

My area is pretty apolitical, I guess.

I think most centrist or right wingers don't talk about politics on fb.

I think Labour are being far too passive

Maybe not a popular or even sensible view but what they could do with is a leader (and front bench) with a bit of wit and good comic timing. Outsmarting BJ with some intelligent ridicule is probably the most effective way to expose his bluster and lies, and would play well to the public, who seem to crave entertainment in politics (I can’t think of any other reason for supporting the PM).

@Piggywaspushed

I honestly don't hear the women's rights thing round here : the DM does like to inflame it.

I think my views on trans rights are probably not the same as yours, so will leave that one there!

My FB feed is highly curated : not many friends. Quite a few are American but the only very outspoken political views I have ever read are for my Trumpist BIL. And an Irish friend who now hardly posts.

My area is pretty apolitical, I guess.

I agree Piggy. Living in the Tees valley womans rights and trans aren't top of the agenda here. Lots don't even know the issues. To be honest I am only aware from reading here.

@Piggywaspushed

Also, with Labour 'telling people they are wrong'- we can't redo the Brexit campaign so what else can they do? It seems a lot of folk in Cambs etc like the Tories/Leavers being told they are wrong!

We've not mentioned antisemitism yet, have we?

Despite Boris, I couldn't vote Corbyn in 2019 because of the antisemitism. I don't know how much attention people paid to it, but it was truly awful - following Sam Freedman ( ❤️ ❤️) who is Jewish and was talking about it quite early on made me look into it further and the way the Labour Party and leadership treated Jewish concerns was almost trolling them. Delighting in their discomfort. And there were proper Labour accounts on twitter (Young Labour for example) posting antisemitic jibes at their own MPs. The way Luciana Berger was treated was just utterly, unspeakably appalling by Labour. I know that she left the party, and many others left the party over it, but there are plenty still there who were happily telling Jews and concerned parties that there wasn't any antisemitism problem in Labour, it was all a plot to smear Corbyn etc etc. Another example of telling people that they are wrong to raise concerns, that they are stupid and they don't know what they can see with their own eyes.

Agree, but that turned into not being able to call out Israel for their reprehensible actions. So the ultra orthodox end of Jewish society has held Labour to ransom, and Labour were previously often able to call on the urban Jewish vote.

Corbyn himself was quite good - open, honest- about this on the telly yesterday. I think it would be unfair to say that Keir's version of Labour is anti Semitic.

Let's not forget the trolling the Jewish Millibands got from the DM.

@DanglingMod

I think most centrist or right wingers don't talk about politics on fb.

Agreed. I think they don't talk to pollsters either.

Everyone was so shocked by brexit vote but of course they wouldn't know how many people were going to vote for leave when they they were bombarded on facebook with memes about how anyone who wanted to leave Europe was thick, racist, uneducated and old etc.

It didn't lend itself to conversation and understanding people's views and reasoning and engaging with them. Instead the 'pantomime morality' and of course the people with a view that would incur booing and hissing kept them to themselves.

Who would that be born??

Jess Phillips ? (too right of centre for me but I am one person, rapidly discovering I am too LW for England!)

Keir and Corbyn both very humourless. Ed Balls is funny.

The other option is someone a bit dashing : Khan and Burnham...David Milliband.

My friend's da and brother are both quite right wing (oddly the brother lives in Scandinavia!) , the dad v pro Breit and quite racist (but hates Boris...) and the brother an anti vaxxer. They, according to my friend, are very vocal on FB. As is my DBIL.

Someone said upthread about an area that voted tory and that they assumed that it was because there was huge migration to that area and people didn't like it. Presumably that was met with well they must be racist, thick etc rather than exploring the issue looking at what they didn't like, how their lives had been effected and what their concerns were and looking at ways to address and resolve issues.

I think this is we have a politics of silence or just the 'right think' rhetoric and then people are drawn to the right as the only place where concerns are addressed. Or where they think well at least this lot don't think maths is racist for an out there example.

There's no mature discussion or nuance to issues if the response is immediate silencing and accusations of being a nazi. Then parties campaign on what they think they're fighting against when they don't even know what they're fighting against because they haven't listened to concerns and have instead just assumed them to be x, y and z. In the immigration example above for example maybe they'd have found that promising to extend public services that had been overstretched or addressing problems with houses of multiple occupation etc might have been vote winners rather than just assuming well they're thick and racist and there's no point talking to them.

This is where we have... Sorry that post is full of errors. Half asleep and in need of coffee.

I don't think being anti vax is rw? My most vocal anti vax friends are v left, hippy, drig using types.

Really? The ones s I know are rabid conspiracy theorists : but, yes, I know the extreme left has anti vaxxers. So, to correct , he is very right wing and an anti vaxxer/ anti lockdowner.

Agree, but that turned into not being able to call out Israel for their reprehensible actions

I think that was one of the ways that certain Labour people trolled the Jewish community. Posting constant anti-Israel content and asking Jewish people to justify it is antisemitic, but when called out they'd be all wide-eyed innocent 'we should be allowed to criticise Israel'. If you looked at certain Labour accounts at the time, you'd think that Israel was the only country in the world doing anything worthy of comment. No mention of genocide in China or Myanmar, for example.

There's no mature discussion or nuance to issues

Totally this!!

The anti vaxers on my feed all vote green.

Yy yo everything, Honey.

Some very interesting and nuanced pro Brexit posters were persistently shot down on the boards here over the months and years. People who had actual lived experience of immigration affecting them and talked of solutions and things they'd like to have seen proposed.

Meanwhile, my fb feed was full of horror that their children wouldn't get to study abroad or work abroad and how dare the racists take that away from them? When in reality more than the population don't go to university, don't care or haven't heard of Erasmus and just want decent local jobs and facilities, and not be called dim or racist for being happy to live in the area they were born in.

And, yes to the antisemitism issue peaking two years ago. A massive, massive problem and blind spot.

Who would that be born??

Goodness knows. I’m not a fan of JP who I think is neither as bright nor as funny as cracked up to be.
I think that whereas rising to a high position in the Conservative party is not hindered, in fact may be helped, by being a bit of a maverick and distinctly un-PC, the opposite is true in the current Labour Party, where any sense of wrongspeak against the approved dogma gets you sidelined at an early stage unless you happen to tick a few convenient boxes. After that you’re OK until seen as a liability (see Angela Rayners and others). Unfortunately this can result in a front bench of the safe but talentless.

The Israel thing is complicated by British ties in the past with Palestine, though and the Wests funding of various governments, autocrats and military regimes in the Middle East so not quite the same as China.

Piggy, I'm not saying that criticism of Israel isn't reasonable, I'm saying that it was used in a deliberate way to target Jewish people and that is antisemitic.

I spent about a week just browsing through twitter, blog posts, news stories and so on in March 2019 and at the end of it I felt totally sick. Genuinely depressed with the state of humanity. And it wasn't just 'criticism of Israel being used in an antisemitic way', there was proper, obvious antisemitism, holocaust denial, Jewish conspiracy theories (Rothschilds/Soros, control of the media, secret rulers of the world etc etc) stuff coming from accounts/people that would be cleared or not immediately expelled by the Labour complaints process.

My mum worked for Soros. I taught a boy who kept spouting crap about him. A lot of that came from right wing America ,somehow becoming left wing here.

Talking about anti-vaxxers, a lot of those 'microchip in the vaccine' conspiracy theorists end up blaming the Jews as well.

I had to report a (longtime) poster on MN a couple of weeks back who genuinely claimed that a secret Jewish sex cult was running the world. She had been posting some wacky ' Great Reset' theories; a bit of prodding and the antisemitism just came out.

There is a renewal of anti Semitism. It is mainly- to be fair- from a resurgence of the Far Right. Trump is deeply anti Semitic as are many non Jewish US businessmen. Tory party anti semitism did go rather unreported.

It's all very dispiriting.