Important article by Lionel Shriver

[FarriersGirl]

Leading article in the Times today by Lionel Shriver. She has long been a critic of woke but really doesn't pull any punches. In particular she highlights the fact that far from being progressive the era of woke has been the opposite.

www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/ditching-woke-brain-rot-transgender-pronouns-58g8dpxnp

Do you think anything advertised at you has to feature people of the same race as you?? Would you not shop in JL because they feature black people in their adverts?

If she had said this is the 4th year in a row JL Christmas adverts have featured black and brown people when this is less than 25% of the UK population, she may have had a point. But she didn't, she referenced one specific advert, featuring a black family and said it looked like it had been made in Nigeria. This is blatantly racist.

She celebrated the return of the word retarded, so often used as a slur against disabled people. No context here at all. Just pure disablism.

As the pendulum swings back, we can't lose sight of what is just plain wrong. What she wrote was racist and bigoted.

I would call out both CRT and BLM as racist.

Western values, perhaps? Toleration, acceptance of diversity, women's rights (and their right to be protected from harm e.g. sex-based violence, exploitation, discrimination), freedom of conscience?

But she didn't, she referenced one specific advert, featuring a black family and said it looked like it had been made in Nigeria. This is blatantly racist.

No she didn't. She siad this year's ad didn't look like it was fimed in Nigeria i.e. not mostly black people.

You can decide this means she hates black people and doesn't want them in adverts.

Or,

you could conisder alongside other things she's said, political movemnts, and commentators, that it means she rejects corportations pushing positive discri aination on the electortae, becsuawe she beleives this is wrong.

In one of those scebarios she is racist , in the other CRT and DEI, and you, are racist.

Either way just calling each other racist isn't going to get us anywhere, and so better to agree racism is awful and consider why we have differing views on the way to address it.

This is a short cut way to close down discussion by using a slur that you beleive concludes just by its utterance that I should not be listened to because I am a bad person.

Very 2024.

Afaik 'retarded' is still around. It means developing later or socially inappropriate. It's medical use as meaning impaired intellectual development is not currently used and shows no inclination for a comeback.
The colloquial use of 'retarded' has never gone away. But LS appears to be applying it to 'woke' ideologues, suggesting that their ideological development is in some way impaired or that they lack intellectual rigour. Not sure I want to use the word that way, preferring 'bloody stupid, ignorant nitwits' myself.

This annoyed me as well. I don't think shareholders' interests should be put before environmental concerns. This is what has happened with the 'water industry' in the UK (the commodification of utilities is one of the worst aspects of free market globalization) where water companies have paid dividends to shareholders using finance intended to repair infrastructure.

I had forgotten that in my disinclination to agree with LS re shareholders. Not sure one can put Thames Water in the same basket as people throwing soup at a Van Gogh. I don't think LS does this either, but she is using a US perspective?

Yes, this is absolutely true!
DS2 was up for an award for a post-grad course and was told off the record he was the preferred candidate, but it would 'help' if he declared himself non-binary on his application and that 'it's OK, you won't actually have to change anything in reality'. He didn't want to - feels very hetro/masculine and not ashamed of it.

He didn't get the bursary - it went to a girl who changed her pronouns to they/them and tinted her hair pink for the exact 12 month duration of the post-grad course. Her relationship status with with longstanding boyfriend was unchanged...

Only by those who oppose women's rights.

I'm not a fan of all that Lionel Shriver says, but I agree with her suggestion that we should all take every opportunity to suggest that identity politics are now passé and uncool. I'm always writing 'Sex not Gender' on forms and dropping emails to councillors about money spent on rainbow crossings and police lanyards.

It was a genuine question. What is fat phobia? Being fat is bad for your health, is a trigger for cancer etc. Telling someone they need to lose weight is not fat phobia, but good sense.

A bunch of unformed thoughts. I think advertising has pendulum swung away from the 'pale/male' being the default person in adverts, to a lot more black actors. It could be argued, that because every agency is working to increase their diversity, that now the 'pale/male' is not represented enough to match demographics (when in England and Wales, black ethnicity represents 4% of the population). I'm not sure how you can divide a cast of an advert sensibly to match demographics though. Also - with asian at 8% of the population, I would say that they are under-represented. So I wonder if this is influenced by London ? If all the advertising agencies are London based, it has a much different ethnic mix than the rest of the UK, and they are reflecting what they are seeing out the window, but we are not all looking out the same window.

Clearly a wrong focus by LS. Those using the Republic of Ireland were France and Germany, in order to impede Brexit. The French premier, who rules places like Reunion, which are so far from France they are not in the same time zone, implied that NI was not the same country as the UK (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland) which is legally a lie.

Aha! A member of the 'gentrification semantics' group.

What do you mean, @Grammarnut? Could you link the post I agreed with?

I think this may be true about the advertising agencies having a skewed London perspective as to what is 'normal/average'.
Basically every advert these days seems to feature a mixed race couple/family, when in reality fewer than 10% of the UK's couples are mixed race. I've noticed a bit of a pushback on social media these days with a fair smattering of green 'tick box' emoticons being used to signal that someone thinks the company is 'ticking a diversity box' in their advertising - The National Trust/Woodland Trust/ English Heritage get a lot of this reaction.
The pendulum needs to swing back to something that feels more balanced and representative of the population make-up as a whole.

It's tricky for advertisers because you risk alienating your main customer base. I looked at most of the John Lewis and M&S clothing ads this year and felt they weren't for 'people like me' (i.e. female, white, size 12) as they all seemed to feature 6ft black, masculine/trans models (on whom the clothes looked pretty dreadful!) and yet I bet my demographic makes up 80% of their sales!

I also remember seeing her talk about the book and she wrote it from such an ungenerous place (imo).

Sound the alarm: a woman has been ungenerous! Pass the smelling salts. All those much-admired curmudgeonly male writers — Amis pere et fils, Christopher Hitchens, Will Self, Jeremy Paxman — appreciated for their contrarian and critical and hard-nosed takes, but a woman does the same and wham, she's ungenerous. And this on a feminist message board...

I really struggle to empathize with views like the one above.

With regards to clothes I get that it's very difficult to judge women's styles on a male form, and there are definitely brands whose models make it quite clear I'm too old for them, but seeing something on a black woman wouldn't make me think 'not for me'. The black women I know and see tend to dress broadly similar to how I do anyway.

As for other things, I don't see what difference it makes whether it's a black man pushing a flash mop around or an Asian woman feeding her kids fish fingers- I wouldn't attribute either thing as belonging to any particular race and it doesn't influence my purchasing choice in any way.

Shriver is not just anti-Irish, when she lived in Belfast (pre-ceasefire) and appeared often enough to be a recognisable and scary voice on RTÉ radio she was very pro-Loyalist - not Unionist, Loyalist. That was when the murder gangs were still active. I suspect her insistence (see Wikipedia) she changed her name to Lionel when she was 15 is to try to make people forget what she used to say when she was still Margaret Anne, lived on this island, and condoned those who pursued violence.

The nice thing is that all those programmes will be stashed away somewhere in the archives. The other nice thing is that I don't need to waste time reading her. At best she's amoral, and she isn't someone I want in my head.

Wow, that is shocking! (As well as showing the criteria to be completely nonsensical).

Shriver was implying the Good Friday Agreement was incompatible with Brexit I think. It's hard to pick the bones from such an insulting diatribe.

Yes she had herself photographed with a mug bearing the legend UFF , Ulster Freedom Fighters - a paramilitary group which murdered dozens of innocent people. A very odd puppy is Lionel.

I think that what goes on with this is that a lot of people in these advertising companies really want to be able to say their work-forces have high diversity - this is beneficial for them even in terms of marketing themselves, but also to get on certain lists of diverse companies, etc. But their staff tend to be pretty typically middle class educated people who will skew white.

Hiring a lot of diversity actors allows them to fudge that.

I think it's always the weight of many instances, it's not the particular fish finger mother.

I would even say that most people don't think there needs to be some exact representation of the public's demographics, people understand that advertisers want to represent differernt kinds of customers. Or some items may be marketed to specific groups because those are the customers.

It's when it seems very far out of balance overall that people think something is being pushed, whether they believe that to be some kind of comment about white people being uncool, or virtue signalling, or something else. When it's blatant enough that you start to notice it's really out of step with the reality around you, you have to wonder why.

I'd add to that, most people don't respond well to moral lectures from corporations.

I have wondered at times, given how out of skewed representation is with actors, not just in advertising but in the theater, if it is harder for young European actors to get started compared to non-white actors. From anecdotes I've heard from the few people I know who work in that area I suspect that it is a disadvantage.